


Some Librarian to Love

by one_more_cup_of_tea



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Library, Banter, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, I'm just trying to write the fluffy gay romcom that we all need in the year of our satanic lord 2020, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots (Good Omens), Is this a plot or just three lines of banter in a trenchcoat?, Light Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn (but not too slow because I'm an impatient bitch), The only conflict is that they're too clueless to realize they're into each other, The world isn't ending but these dumbasses still flirt like there's no tomorrow, Why confess your feelings to your crush when you can flirt about the quantity of their nipples?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:29:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 42,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27171101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/one_more_cup_of_tea/pseuds/one_more_cup_of_tea
Summary: Meet Ezra Phale, newest staff member at the Tadmeadow Public Library. Ezra collects books, drinks cocoa, never got his driver's license, and most definitely does not have a crush on his quick-witted coworker, AJ Crowley. Perish the thought. No matter how much he banters with AJ at work, and accepts rides in his Bentley, and goes out for drinks with him, and can't imagine letting a day pass without talking to him—no, Ezra's feelings are purely platonic. And that's for the best, because it would take a (little demonic) miracle for AJ ever to like him back. Right?New chapters every week or so!
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 45
Kudos: 78





	1. Chapter 1

Ezra Phale was preparing his morning cocoa when he suddenly recalled that he had dreamed about his coworker during the previous night.

In typical dream fashion, the details remained hazy in his memory. He and his coworker had been trapped inside a burning building that vaguely resembled Ezra's own apartment. The bookcases lining his walls had burst into flames, leaving his precious books beyond hope of recovery. He had tried to lead the way out of the blazing apartment, but his legs had refused to operate at anything but a sloth-like pace. To make matters worse, when he had looked behind him, dream-Ezra had beheld his coworker sitting in the middle of the inferno, shouting something about a lost friend.

The dream had been very unpleasant, and Ezra could not understand why it had involved AJ Crowley, of all people.

Whatever friend AJ had been bewailing in the dream, it certainly could not be Ezra. Since starting work at the Tadmeadow Public Library three weeks ago, Ezra had barely interacted with AJ. They attended the same staff meetings, but no opportunities for more direct collaboration had yet arisen. They merely said a perfunctory hello to each other whenever they crossed paths during the workday.

Still, over the past week, there had been a few times when they had happened to leave work together and had come closer to actual conversation. On the first of these occasions, AJ had simply said "Good night" as he propped the door open for Ezra, but on another day, a Friday, he had asked, "Have any plans for the weekend?" Caught off guard, Ezra had stammered, "Not really. Good night!" and continued walking to the parking lot, already trying to suppress the memory of the awkward encounter.

There had also been that time last week when he had entered the break room to find AJ pouring himself a mug of coffee from the staff coffee maker. AJ had asked if he wanted any, and when Ezra had explained that he preferred cocoa, AJ had replied in a dry, but not unkind, tone, "Very sweet." Obviously, he had been talking about the cocoa.

Ezra did not pause to consider why he recalled these specific incidents so vividly. He had to get ready for work.

Ezra did not have a car or, for that matter, a driver's license, so he carpooled with his neighbor Ana, who had a job in an office park close to the library. They had started commuting together over a year ago, when he had worked at a library in a neighboring town. The drive there had not been long, but he had felt bad for lengthening Ana's commute. Consequently, when a job had opened at Tadmeadow, he had jumped at the opportunity to work at a more convenient location.

"You seem off today," remarked Ana once they had left the apartment complex. It was a cold day in February, and she was wrapped in a long wool coat that Ezra could never decide was mostly green or mostly blue.

"Off? How so?" Ezra frowned as he inspected his pale hair in the mirror attached to the sun visor above his seat.

"Just something about your aura."

"Oh, mind your own aura." Ana dabbled in witchcraft, and he was used to her comments about auras and omens, good or otherwise.

Ana rolled her eyes behind her round, dark-framed glasses. "It doesn't take any special powers to tell that you're unusually concerned about your appearance today." She nodded toward the mirror.

"You talk as if I'm normally a slob," he objected, but he snapped the sun visor back into place.

"Of course not. You're more likely to grow wings than have a stray wrinkle in your shirt." Ezra glanced self-consciously down at his beige coat, beneath which he wore a white Oxford shirt that he had, indeed, meticulously ironed. "But," Ana continued, "on most mornings, you're dozing off in your seat instead of checking yourself out."

"Checking—" Ezra stopped himself from arguing. "It's too early for this conversation."

"What, are you planning for someone else to check you out?"

"Too early!" Ezra repeated. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes for the rest of the commute.

Ezra worked at a reference desk on the second floor of the library, in the section for adult nonfiction. During his first two weeks at Tadmeadow, one of the other librarians had sat with him to guide him through the proper procedures, but this week he had begun working alone.

A steady flow of patrons visited the desk during the first few hours of his shift. Eventually, though, things became quiet in the nonfiction area, and Ezra grew bored. He grabbed a book from a nearby shelf and leafed through it, sipping the last drops of cocoa from his thermos.

He was still perusing the book when a familiar voice complained, "I cannot find a fucking stapler in this entire building."

Startled, Ezra looked up to find AJ Crowley slouched against the desk, a sheaf of paper in his hand and a pair of sunglasses perched on top of his auburn hair. Despite his irritated tone, the gaze that he directed at Ezra was friendly, if not a bit intense.

Ezra felt oddly nervous, but doubtless this was due to the challenge of locating a stapler. "I think we have one here," he replied, turning in his chair to rummage in one of the desk drawers. Luckily, a stapler appeared almost immediately, and he gave it to his coworker. On the other hand, finding the stapler so quickly may not have been lucky after all, because now Ezra had to face AJ before he had the time to push the memory of his recent dream into the farthest recesses of his mind.

Regardless of any discomfort that Ezra's expression betrayed, AJ remained unaware of his nocturnal foray into Ezra's subconscious. "Thanks," he said as he stapled his papers. "Got a pen?"

He took the pen that Ezra handed to him and signed one of the papers. The sleeves of his black shirt were rolled up, and Ezra noticed a tattoo of a snake coiled on the inside of his right forearm.

"You're like a guardian angel dispensing office supplies," AJ quipped. "I was about to tear my desk apart looking for a damn stapler. Here, catch." He tossed the pen back to Ezra, who managed to catch it with minimal fumbling.

To Ezra's surprise, AJ lingered at the desk, his eyes traveling from the all-important stapler, to the book that Ezra had been reading, and then to Ezra's thermos. "Still hot chocolate?" he asked, indicating the thermos, which was decorated with a pastel tartan pattern.

"Oh, yes," answered Ezra. In a burst of nervous energy, he picked up the container and tried to take a drink from it, but then he remembered it was empty and set it down again. "Still coffee for you?" This, he told himself, was his chance for redemption after failing to reciprocate AJ's previous query about weekend plans.

"Listen, I need coffee to survive. I'd be a demon without it."

"I'm afraid you could not tempt me away from my cocoa."

AJ lifted his eyebrows. "I wouldn't dream of corrupting you with caffeine." He paused. "Unless, of course, you want to be corrupted."

"No, not at the moment."

"Rain check on corruption. Got it."

Ezra was almost disappointed to see a patron approaching the desk. "Looks as if I have to return to work."

AJ backed away from the desk. "At least I know to come to you next time I have a stapler crisis. It's Ezra, right?"

"Yes, and you're AJ."

"Good memory!" He lifted his hand in a parting wave and sauntered out of the nonfiction section.

Ezra greeted the patron with a smile that was too bright to have been inspired purely by the joys of customer service. "Hello!" he chirped.

The man, whose face was shadowed by a baseball cap featuring the image of a rather sinister-looking lizard, nodded at Ezra and slid a stack of books across the desk. Normally, Ezra paid attention to what books the patrons had selected, to give further recommendations, but this time his eyes drifted unseeingly over the titles. He held the first book under the scanner and frowned when his computer screen showed an error message.

"Hm, there seems to be something wrong."

The patron chuckled with an air of poorly concealed condescension. "Don't you need this?" He held up his library card.

"Oh! Right! Yes, I do need that. Thanks." Ezra felt his face redden as he scanned the card, which felt alarmingly grimy, and returned to checking out the books, this time with more success.

Once the man had left, Ezra slumped in his chair. He could not recall making such an embarrassing mistake since his first position as a library clerk.

The new job must be making him flustered, he reasoned. The building and the people were still unfamiliar to him. He was understandably overwhelmed.

AJ Crowley, of course, had nothing to do with it. Dreams be damned.


	2. Chapter 2

Later that week, Ezra arrived at the library to find his supervisor, Mary, awaiting him.

"How are you doing, Ezra? We haven't talked in a while," she greeted him. In reality, they had chatted at lunch only a few days before, but Mary craved talk as fervently as stereotypical librarians yearn for silence.

"I'm doing well," he managed to answer before Mary embarked on one of her characteristic tangents.

"I am getting sick and tired of how patrons refuse to acknowledge that we're not accepting donations for our bookshop. We keep telling them that we already have more donations than we know what to do with, but they just won't listen. Like, just yesterday, I had a man come in with a big box of books, and we told him multiple times we didn't want them, and what does he do but just leave the box right outside the building?" She paused to take a breath.

"That's annoying," said Ezra, still trying to shake off his morning grogginess.

"Honestly, if anyone gives you a donation and it looks like trash, you have my full permission just to throw it out. I know a few weeks ago somebody put a whole bunch of old magazines in our book drop. _The Aquarius_ , or something like that. I was going to toss them, only Adam—you know, one of the pages—thought they looked interesting."

Ezra promised to dispose of any questionable donations and was about to make his way upstairs when Mary accosted him again.

"Oh! I almost forgot why I wanted you in the first place. You've been working up in nonfiction, right?" Ezra nodded, and she continued, "Tracy called in sick today, so I thought I'd have you take her spot at the fiction and tech desk. Is that all right? It's a bit busier there, so you'll gain some more experience. Get more comfortable with the library, you know? I'll have someone cover for your usual shift. Is that good with you?"

Ezra complied without hesitation. Apparently, Mary had not bothered to add this change to the online staff calendar, which, when he had checked it that morning, had still assigned him to his usual desk. He had also happened to notice, coincidentally, of course, that the schedule listed AJ as working at fiction and tech that day. It must have been the cluster of capital letters that had drawn his eyes to the block on the calendar labelled "AJ C."

Meanwhile, Mary was happy that Ezra had agreed to the change of workspace. "I'll go upstairs with you and make sure AJ's all right with it, too," she said.

She led the way out of the staff area, through the library's atrium, and up the main staircase to the second floor. Once they reached the landing, they faced the entrance to the fiction and tech section. The double doors, now propped open for patrons, were set in a glass wall decorated with brightly colored swirls of paint. On the opposite side of the landing stood the entry to the nonfiction section, which was decorated with a similar array of hues.

Whereas the nonfiction desk stood off to the side of its area, the fiction and tech desk was centrally located to face the entrance. Shelves of books stood behind the desk and to its left, while on the right were two rows of public computers. There were a few tables and chairs where patrons could linger, but most of the public seating was across the hall in nonfiction, which also housed the library's private study rooms.

The building was still a few minutes away from opening, so the room was deserted except for AJ, who was typing at one of the desk's two computers.

"Good morning, AJ!" trilled Mary.

"Morning, Mary," said AJ in a decidedly less enthusiastic voice, not taking his eyes away from his screen. He had the same sunglasses with him as on the previous day, only now they were hooked onto the collar of his black shirt.

"I know you've met Ezra before, but I'll introduce you again."

AJ finally looked up from his work, and his eyes seemed to brighten, no doubt as an effect of the sunlight filtering through the bank of windows behind the desk. "Ah, the patron saint of staplers!"

Mary spoke before Ezra could reply. "Oh, are you friends already? That's perfect. Ezra's going to cover for Tracy today, and I'll get a substitute to work across the hall."

"Fine with me," AJ responded nonchalantly.

"Excellent!" Mary turned back to Ezra, tidying some strands of dark hair that had escaped from her neat updo. "Give me a holler if you need me. Have fun!" The click of her heels receded from earshot as she left the room and descended the staircase.

"Grab a chair," said AJ, and Ezra realized that he himself hadn't spoken since entering the room. Although he couldn't match Mary's enthusiasm, he delivered a friendly "good morning" as he walked behind the desk and logged into the second computer.

"Good morning to you, too," AJ answered, but he had already returned to his computer and continued to type in silence. At this rate, thought Ezra, they would have no opportunity to make conversation before patrons arrived to vie for their attention.

Just before the library opened, however, AJ stopped typing, made a few decisive clicks with his mouse, and leaned back in his chair. "God, emails are hell. Anyhow, on to more important things." He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stapler. "Look what I found."

"Where was it?" The vague sense of disappointment that had lodged in Ezra's gut took flight immediately, though it was replaced by the stress of finding something interesting to say to his coworker.

"Back of the drawer, covered by some papers. I wouldn't have had to bother you if I had just been more thorough."

"I didn't mind." He took a gulp of cocoa, hoping that the sugar would help him shake off this irritating shyness.

AJ, nonetheless, did not seem deterred by Ezra's taciturnity. Once the first rush of patrons had slowed to a trickle, he swiveled his chair to face Ezra and asked, "So, why'd you take this job?"

"It was just more convenient," said Ezra, finding himself more talkative now that he'd interacted with the patrons. "I used to work over in Eden Heights, but I carpool with my neighbor—well, I guess she's also my friend—and that commute was getting too long for her."

"You don't drive yourself?"

"No," he replied somewhat warily.

"Did you ever learn?"

Grateful not to sense any condescension in AJ's tone, Ezra admitted, "The very first time my father took me out driving, I hit a mailbox to avoid running over a squirrel. I never tried again."

"Oh." AJ's lips twitched. "Well, it's best that you stopped then before you got carried away and started hitting people to avoid squirrels."

Before they could speak further, a patron approached the desk and asked for assistance in using a computer to print out her resume. AJ escorted her to one of the computers, while Ezra found himself busy with an elderly man who needed help locating the newest installment in a series of mystery novels. As he returned to the desk, Ezra saw that AJ was still with the woman, pointing to different areas of her computer screen and then guiding her to the public printer that stood nearby. AJ barely smiled during this tutorial, nor did he seem inclined to engage in small talk with the woman as they waited for her document to print. Still, Ezra was surprised by the gentleness he perceived in his coworker's demeanor.

When AJ slouched back into his seat at the desk, having accepted the woman's hearty thanks with an indifferent shrug, he made no mention of his recent activities. Instead, he fished his phone from the pocket of his black jeans, pulled up a picture, and slid the phone across the desk toward Ezra.

"That's what I drive."

The image showed an expensive-looking vintage car with a glossy black sheen. Ezra recognized it from the parking lot but, for some reason, he had never realized who owned it. When he and AJ had left work simultaneously, he had been too preoccupied with their abortive conversations to notice what AJ was driving.

"It's a beautiful car," he remarked.

"It's a Bentley," said AJ, taking back the phone and gazing fondly at the picture. "I have an uncle—he's a rich old devil—who collects and restores them, and he gave me this after I got my library degree. He probably felt sorry for me for not being in a more glamorous career." He scrolled through more pictures and handed the phone back to Ezra. "Here's the interior."

Ezra did not feel remotely passionate about automobiles, but, for his coworker's sake, he made some admiring comments about the Bentley's dark leather upholstery.

"That car's my best friend," said AJ as he pocketed his phone, and even though he sounded only half serious, Ezra could not help detecting a melancholy undercurrent in his voice.

The day proceeded uneventfully. As Mary had indicated, the fiction and tech section was busier than nonfiction, and the desk often had a line of patrons wanting to check out items, pay fines, and access the computers. Ezra and AJ had few chances to talk privately until their shift ended in the afternoon. The library would remain open for a few more hours, but other librarians were scheduled to manage the desk for that period.

Once the evening crew arrived, Ezra and AJ gathered their bags and now-empty thermoses and descended to the staff area on the first floor. They found Mary in the break room, eating a cookie from an assortment that one of the librarians had brought in that morning.

"Ezra!" exclaimed Mary. "How did it go today?"

"Good." Ezra followed Mary's lead and selected a cookie. "No problems at all."

"Oh, that's wonderful. I know things can get hectic up there, so I'm glad you were able to handle it. AJ, is everything good with you?"

"Yes, fine," said AJ shortly. He leaned against the wall behind Ezra and looked at his phone, one black-clad ankle crossed over the other. Several staff members passed through the break room on their way out of the building, but AJ made no move to leave.

"Ezra, how would you feel about helping out in fiction and tech on Thursdays?" Mary asked. "It might be nice for you to have a change of scenery every week. Tracy can handle the nonfiction desk; she was just telling me the other day that she prefers a quieter workspace. She said something about trying to be more spiritually aware, but, between you and me, I think she just wants to drink tea at her desk without patrons bothering her every minute. Anyhow, what do you think?"

"I'd like that," Ezra answered at once.

Mary, of course, was pleased at his choice. Before she could draw him into further conversation, one of the library clerks entered the room and began speaking with her about some occurrence at the main circulation desk. Ezra recognized the clerk as Warryn, a student at the local university who worked at the library part-time. When Ezra managed the nonfiction section, Warryn sometimes visited during her lunch break to peruse the shelf of books about military history, which was evidently the topic of her senior thesis. Her red hair was shaved on one side, and, as she stooped to grab a cookie, Ezra could see she wore earrings shaped like miniature guillotines. A tiny, severed head dangled from the bottom of each earring, almost grazing the shoulders of her leather jacket.

Now that Mary was occupied with Warryn, Ezra had no reason to remain at the library. He picked up his thermos from where he had set it on the break room table.

"Heading out?" asked AJ, pushing away from the wall.

"Yes, I'm all done here." Ezra moved toward the break room door and was about to wish AJ good night, but, unexpectedly, AJ fell into step beside him. They crossed the hallway together and entered the delivery room, where the staff exit was located. A coat rack stood by the door, next to crates of returned books and media that were waiting to be shipped back to their owning libraries across the county.

"It'll be good to have you around on Thursdays," AJ remarked while they donned their coats.

"Yes, looking forward to it," agreed Ezra with a smile.

He held the door open for AJ and stepped out onto the sidewalk that bordered the building. Ana's SUV was already parked nearby, but before he could take his leave, AJ said, "My Bentley's parked over there if you want to see it in person." He gestured toward the far corner of the parking lot, where Ezra could see the fading sunlight glinting off the hood of the Bentley.

Ezra hesitated. Despite what he had to admit was genuine curiosity about his coworker's interests, shyness once again overpowered him and made AJ's suggestion seem fraught with awkward possibilities. He took the ostensibly easier option. "Sorry, but my ride is here, and I shouldn't keep her waiting."

AJ shrugged and dug his hands into his coat pockets. "No problem. See you around." He turned and strode across the parking lot.

"Good night," said Ezra, but his voice sounded so small that he doubted AJ had heard.


	3. Chapter 3

On the following Thursday morning, Ezra felt a little rush of excitement when he opened the online staff schedule and saw his name listed next to AJ's for the fiction and tech desk. He barely had time to pack his lunch because he spent nearly ten minutes retying his bow tie until it met his standards. One had to look presentable for a public-facing job.

Ana, meanwhile, did not share his eagerness for the day ahead. As soon as Ezra climbed into the car and buckled his seatbelt, she began to complain about the weather.

"I cannot believe it's going to snow _again_."

"It doesn't look about to snow." Ezra peered through his window. Grime-encrusted piles of last week's snow lay along the roadside, but no fresh flakes were falling. "Why do you think it will? Witchcraft?"

Sensing his skepticism, Ana shot him an irritated look. "No, Agnes mentioned it this morning."

"Who?"

"You know, the woman who does the weather on the local news. Agnes Nuttall."

"I've never seen her. I don't think I've even heard of her before."

"Well, she's never wrong about the weather," insisted Ana. "I would stake my life on her forecasts. She said today will start with clear skies and then get snowy by the evening."

"If you say so," said Ezra, mystified by Ana's loyalty to the enigmatic Agnes.

Unfortunately for Ana's mood, they were detained at a few particularly long traffic lights, and Ezra reached the second floor of the library with only minutes to spare before the building opened to the public. AJ sat in the same chair that he had occupied last week, holding an open paperback in one hand and his thermos of coffee in the other.

"What are you reading?" asked Ezra as he slipped behind the desk, feeling slightly breathless. He must have climbed the stairs more quickly than usual.

AJ's answer was itself a question: "Did you ever think about what would happen if Atlantis resurfaced, and the folks who'd been living there underwater started palling around with people on a cruise ship?"

"No, I can't say I have."

"That's what the book's about."

Ezra's brow furrowed. "It sounds very strange."

"The Atlantis thing is actually only half of the story. The other half is about two characters—they're a couple—who are trying to stop some unhinged kid from blowing up the cruise ship."

"Is it any good?"

"No, the couple trying to save the ship are complete idiots. I honestly hope they die in the end." With this pronouncement, AJ tossed the book onto the desk. "So much for that."

The first patron who appeared through the double doors was an older man wearing an olive-colored coat that bulged oddly in the front. He marched up to the desk and frowned down his nose at Ezra and AJ.

"I'm looking for some literature."

Ezra waved toward the nearby shelves of books. "Well, we have plenty—"

The man interrupted him with poorly restrained petulance. "No, I'm talking about _literature_ , not the latest comic book. Classics, the western canon. Can you help me, or should I find someone more experienced?"

"I can help you," said Ezra icily. "We should have plenty of classics here, though some of them might be in nonfiction. If you give me specific titles, I can look them up for you." He opened the "Item Information" tab on the library's cataloging software.

"Very well." He shifted the peculiar lump under his coat, and Ezra thought for a moment that it moved, but he wasn't positive.

"Try _Paradise Lost_ ," the patron continued. "I'm looking for a certain edition." Ezra began typing, and the patron added, "Do you need me to tell you the author?"

"I know it's John Milton," Ezra snapped. "I read it back in college."

The man inclined his head in grudging recognition. "You never know these days. Schools don't assign the great books anymore."

"Well, it was some time ago, but I remember liking it, and I wrote a paper about Satan." The search results loaded on Ezra's screen. There was a copy of _Paradise Lost_ at the library, but it wasn't the edition that the patron wanted, so Ezra put a hold on the correct book, to have it shipped from another library in the county. He scanned the patron's library card, and the man's name, R.P. Tyler, appeared in a dialogue box as the computer confirmed the hold.

"What about playwrights?" Tyler continued. "Shakespeare? Oscar Wilde? Christopher Marlowe? _Doctor Faustus_ , do you know that play?"

Ezra found he could be more patient if he took the opportunity to parade his own knowledge. "Yes, I've read it, and I'm familiar with the others, too. They're in the room across the hall. The librarian there can help you." He felt a twinge of pity for whomever was currently assisting patrons at the nonfiction desk.

"You don't keep a card catalog anymore?"

"No, it's all online."

Tyler shook his head, as if digitizing the library catalog was a harbinger of the end times. "I'll go look across the hall." He nodded at Ezra, glanced darkly toward the other end of the desk, and muttered, "At least someone here is invested in real literature."

As Tyler stalked toward the doorway, Ezra looked to his left and found AJ leaning back in his chair, with his feet up on the desk and his face partially hidden behind a mass-market romance novel that another patron had returned. "What are you doing?"

AJ brought his feet back down to the floor and replaced the book with the other returns. "Just trying to annoy him."

"He's a patron. We're supposed to be helpful."

"You help him find his books, and I'll help him understand that we think he's an asshole."

Before Ezra could respond, a dog's bark echoed from the landing, and one of the librarians, who must have been on the staircase, called out, "Sir, we don't allow pets here!" A dachshund dashed into the fiction and tech section, with R.P. Tyler close on its heels, grabbing at the dog's middle. The dog did a sort of somersault in his fumbling grasp, but he managed to bundle it back into the front of his coat. He scowled toward the desk, offended that anyone had witnessed this blow to his dignity, and exited the room for the second time.

Ezra turned to his coworker to comment on the incident, but AJ had clearly lost interest in R.P. Tyler.

"So," AJ crossed his arms and tilted his head to the side, "from your discussion with _him_ , I gather that your interests include demons and homosexuality."

Ezra's cheeks grew warm. "Excuse me?"

"Your _literary_ interests, I should clarify. Oscar Wilde? _Paradise Lost_?"

"I . . . guess so."

AJ shrugged. "You could do worse. Far be it from me to judge." He took a drink from his thermos. "Have you considered combining your interests and finding a book about a gay demon?"

"Why, do you have a recommendation?"

AJ shook his head. "No, reading about queer demons would hit too close to home."

A laugh burst unbidden from Ezra's lips. He was surprised by how readily he responded, "The concept resonates with me, too, but only partially."

"I assume you don't mean the demon half."

"No."

"Thought so. I'd be surprised to find a demon who wore pastel-colored shirts and drank exclusively hot chocolate. Though, then again, that might be exactly the wily kind of thing a demon might get up to."

"You're not being serious."

"I'm only keeping an eye out for foul fiends threatening my immortal soul."

"You literally just compared _yourself_ to a demon."

"Maybe I'm a threat to my own soul." He took another drink of coffee. "Speak of the devil. Here comes the rest of the public." A line of patrons formed at the desk, and the workday began in earnest.

It was a busy Thursday, and Ezra was exhausted when his shift ended that afternoon. He and AJ headed downstairs to the staff area, discussing some of the more memorable patrons they had served that day. One individual had nearly thrown a tantrum at having to pay a fine of thirty-five cents, while another person had returned a book with a strange brown stain obscuring most of the cover. Just thinking about the stain made Ezra want to rush to the nearest restroom to wash his hands again.

Ezra had to visit his personal desk in the staff area to pick up some paperwork that Mary had left for him. When he finally gathered his things and reached the staff exit, AJ stood by the door, wearing his long black overcoat. He slipped his phone into his pocket when Ezra neared the coatrack.

"I won't be in tomorrow," announced AJ. "I'm taking a vacation day."

"That sounds nice," Ezra replied as he rummaged in his messenger bag for his gloves. True to Agnes Nuttall's prediction, the windows in the staff area had revealed a snowy parking lot and more flakes falling lazily from a gray sky.

"I need to give the Bentley a wash. It gets dirty from all the salt they put down to melt the ice."

"My neighbor said we're getting more snow this weekend. Looks as if she was right." Ezra felt that his end of the conversation was so dull that he would not have blamed AJ for either falling asleep on the spot or walking out without another word.

AJ did not budge. "What do you normally do on your days off?"

In his tired state, Ezra could not recall engaging in any specific activities besides merely existing. His memory came to his aid, though, before he implied that his vacations entailed floating in a void of inactivity. "Errands, cleaning, reading. Sometimes I go book shopping."

"A librarian going book shopping. How surprising."

Ezra smiled at his sarcasm. "I'm always looking to add to my collection of used books."

"All classics?" AJ asked, evidently recalling Ezra's interaction with R.P. Tyler.

"Oh, no, lots of different time periods and genres."

"Our friend from earlier would be so disappointed."

"I can't say I care," Ezra replied as he felt his phone vibrate in his hand. He glanced down at the screen.

"That's the spirit," said AJ, still not moving from his spot by the door.

Ana had texted Ezra "I'm here," which was the message she always sent when he took longer than usual to leave work. Instead of responding, he darkened the phone's screen again and held it down at his side. A few additional minutes of waiting would do no harm to Ana.

He could hear a group of coworkers chatting in the break room nearby, prolonging the time until they had to brave the snowy commute. Normally, Ezra would feel a bit melancholy at not being a part of the merry-sounding group of librarians, but today he didn't mind. Besides, he and AJ were doing the same thing as their fellow staff members; the cold weather was obviously the only reason AJ was lingering with him in the delivery room. Or, if not the only reason, certainly the primary one.

AJ spoke before Ezra could consider what the secondary reasons might be. "Do you ever go to that bookstore down the road, over by the coffee shop?"

"Wensley's? Oh, yes, they know me in there."

"I go there fairly often myself."

A couple of other librarians, talking animatedly, burst through the door from the hallway and made a beeline for the coatrack. Ezra stepped aside to make room for the newcomers. Coincidentally, the space next to AJ was the most convenient place for him to stand.

"I hope you enjoy your vacation," he told his coworker.

"Just thought I'd mention it in case you don't see me around."

Ezra didn't point out that he probably would have seen on the staff schedule that AJ was off for the day. Somehow, he found himself looking for AJ's name as often as for his own.

"Are you guys coming?" asked one of the other librarians, bracing open the door to the parking lot against a gust of cold wind. As he and AJ finally resigned themselves to departure and moved together toward the exit, Ezra wondered if AJ would repeat last week's invitation to look at his Bentley. The temperature was frigid, and Ana was undoubtedly becoming impatient, but, still, it wouldn't be polite to refuse a second time.

Nonetheless, once they were outside, AJ simply called, "Good night!" and trekked into the parking lot, snow crunching under his shoes. A tiny needle of disappointment pricked at Ezra's heart, like the snowflakes stinging his face.

The warmth inside Ana's SUV lifted his mood somewhat. As he had expected, Ana scolded him for being late, but her annoyance softened when she launched into another commendation of Agnes Nuttall's meteorological clairvoyance. Ezra devoted half of his attention to her, while the other half was caught up in anticipation for the coming workdays. Unlike AJ, he had no interest in taking a vacation anytime soon.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends! Just popping in with a book recommendation. If you're a Good Omens fan who finds my writing tolerable, you might like The House in the Cerulean Sea, by TJ Klune. The premise of the story is that a man goes on a business trip of sorts to a home for magical children, and adventures ensue. The book includes:  
> -wholesome vibes (Like, aggressively wholesome. You WILL smile and you will LIKE it.)  
> -a precocious child who is also the Antichrist  
> -a cute gay romance  
> -a main character who reminds me of how I've written Ezra/Aziraphale (I promise there's no connection!)  
> I finished the audiobook just the other day and enjoyed it so much! Check it out during your next visit to your local library ;)
> 
> Anyway, onward to this week's shenanigans. Much love to anyone who's taken the time to read my silly little words.

The next week commenced with the monthly all-staff meeting, an event not exactly of apocalyptic proportions, but noteworthy enough to dispel some of Ezra's Monday-morning lethargy. Several coworkers welcomed him as he took a seat in the library's community room, where rectangular tables stood in a large horseshoe formation, with chairs along the outside. He chatted with the children's librarian sitting to his right, whose name was Bee.

During his initial weeks at the library, Ezra had struggled to match the names and faces of his new coworkers, but Bee was one librarian whose name had been easy to remember, due to their distinctive outfits. Today, for example, they wore a dress printed with bumblebees in mid-flight. Tiny plastic flies hung from their earlobes, and a pattern of smiling caterpillars adorned the lanyard for their staff key fob. Ezra enjoyed Bee's company, but he began to feel a crawling sensation on his arms and the back of his neck if he looked for too long at their entourage of insects.

The knowledge that AJ had not yet appeared at the meeting lurked at the back of his mind as he listened to Bee describe their plans to host a family dance party for patrons. Ezra made a mental note to avoid the event, even while he nodded along supportively to Bee's ideas. He checked his watch. The meeting was set to begin at 9:30, and it was now 9:25.

A flash of black in the doorway to his left announced AJ's arrival. Ezra turned his head toward the door in what he hoped was a leisurely fashion and not the manner of a demonically possessed person warming up for a 360-degree head revolution.

There were some unoccupied chairs along the tables nearest the doorway, but AJ angled down the room until he reached the empty seat on Ezra's left. In his desperation to seem nonchalant, Ezra tried to look anywhere but at AJ as his coworker slid into the chair, radiating cold from the wintry March day. The snowfall had abated somewhat since the weekend flurries, but it hadn't ceased entirely. Melting flakes clung to AJ's hair and the omnipresent sunglasses atop his head. A few dampened strands of hair curved downward onto his brow.

Ignoring the rehearsal for Bee's dance party that seemed to be occurring in his stomach, Ezra squared his shoulders and wished his coworker a good morning.

"I overslept," AJ answered in a rush of breath. He removed his sunglasses long enough to smooth a hand over his hair. "Almost didn't make it here in time."

Ezra prepared to inquire how his day off had gone, but AJ pointed toward the legal pad in front of Ezra and asked, "Could I look at your notes afterward? "

"Oh, of course."

"Thanks," said AJ absently. He pored over his phone while he raised his thermos to his lips.

Interpreting AJ's silence as a signal to leave him alone, Ezra busied himself with recording the date at the top of his notepaper. He normally had excellent penmanship, but the last digit of the year emerged as an unsightly scrawl because AJ chose that moment to tap the back of his hand against Ezra's upper arm. Ezra jumped in his seat. His pen skittered across the page.

Once the unwelcome rush of adrenaline began to subside, he realized that AJ was holding out his phone to display a new picture of his car. The Bentley was in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The car's glossy finish presented a striking contrast with the slushy ground, gray sky, and nondescript buildings daubed with snow.

"That's after I had it washed," AJ said. "During my day off, you remember."

Ezra smiled and opened his mouth to say something complimentary, but his brain refused to do anything other than tabulate the precise number of times AJ's hand had touched his arm. He was still trying to formulate coherent words when Bee leaned over to see the picture as well.

"Your car's gorgeous, AJ," they interjected. "I really should get my Bug washed." Predictably, Bee drove a black Volkswagen Beetle. Ezra occasionally wondered if Bee's entomological interests extended to their home décor, or to their choice of house pets. He decided that he was content to remain in blissful ignorance.

At that point, the director of the library stood up from her seat and called everyone to attention.

"It looks nice," Ezra whispered belatedly to AJ before focusing on the meeting, feeling unreasonable annoyance at the director's punctuality. AJ put his phone down next to his thermos.

The director was a woman named Pepper, and Ezra secretly found her intimidating. The first time he had entered her office, she had been simultaneously arguing on the phone with a member of the library board while highlighting passages in a book of intersectional feminist theory. Upon noticing Ezra's presence, she had delivered a parting accusation of casual sexism to the board member, slammed down her phone, and cheerfully offered Ezra some organic chocolate from a jar on her desk. He had gathered from Mary that Pepper's family members had been hippies of some sort, but he had no idea if that was true.

"Good morning, everyone," Pepper now greeted the staff. Her dark hair was pulled sleekly away from her face, and she wore a tailored suit, but as she strode to the front of the room, Ezra saw that her business attire ended in a pair of red rain boots.

"I'd like to jump straight into our agenda for today, which includes a review of the safety procedures for when a child is lost in the library, an overview of our measures to cut back on paper and plastic usage, and an update on our anti-war reading group."

Ezra applied his pen to his legal pad, recording any relevant piece of information beside a carefully drawn bullet point. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see AJ watching him write.

When the meeting was about halfway over, AJ touched his index finger to Ezra's paper and leaned in to tell him in an undertone, "You forgot to cross that _t_."

Ezra's first thought was that AJ's finger had better not have any substance on it that would stain the paper. This concern swiftly gave way to a second thought, which was that his coworker's hand had been only inches away from his own and that if he had wanted he could have taken his pen and drawn a bullet point right at the base of AJ's neatly trimmed fingernail.

Instead, he nodded and crossed the _t_.

Ten minutes later, Pepper announced that the library would soon highlight books and movies exploring apocalyptic themes, with a display in the atrium entitled "Arm-in-Arm to Armageddon." Ezra made a note to suggest items for the display and drummed his pen on the legal pad as he began to mull over titles. AJ, still eying Ezra's writing, shattered his train of thought by remarking in the same low tone as before, "I think there's only one _g_ in 'Armageddon.'"

Ezra dutifully scribbled out the extra letter in his notes, but, along with his inexplicably elevated heartrate, he felt a small bubble of irritation inflate in his chest. When AJ leaned toward him yet again a few minutes later, Ezra turned to him and hissed, "Maybe you'd rather take the notes yourself."

AJ appeared taken aback, though his eyes gleamed with amusement. "I was only going to say you have nice handwriting."

Ezra blinked, caught off guard. "Oh. Thank you." He was spared from having to think of a further response, since Pepper, with her keen eye for inattention, cast a sharp glance in his direction. He and AJ held their tongues for the rest of the meeting.

Once the gathering was over and everyone rose from their seats, AJ used his phone to take a picture of Ezra's notes. "Thanks again," he said as he checked the legibility of the image.

"It's fine. And thank you for your complimentary editing services."

AJ flashed him a grin. "Any time." He picked up his thermos. "Are you all done here?"

Ezra tucked his notepad under one arm, grabbed his cocoa from the table, and accompanied AJ into the atrium and up the staircase. "You know you could have just waited until someone posted the meeting minutes online," he couldn't help pointing out as they reached the landing and prepared to part ways for their respective desks.

"I never remember to read those."

Ezra highly doubted this was true, especially because he recalled that AJ himself had been assigned to take the minutes at the February all-staff meeting. Nonetheless, he decided not to press the issue.

Ezra's Thursday morning began with his annual appointment at the eye doctor's office. Mary had told him that he could take the day off if he wanted, but Ezra had assured her that he would be able to work after the appointment. Relaxing at home felt like a waste of a Thursday when he could be up at the fiction and tech desk.

He visited the doctor first thing in the morning and arrived at the library by Uber right after lunch. The dilation drops in his pupils were wearing off, but his eyes remained somewhat sensitive, so he brought along an old pair of sunglasses to wear in the brightly lit library.

AJ was helping a patron when Ezra arrived at the desk, but he did not fail to notice Ezra's protective eyewear.

He swiveled his chair to face Ezra as soon as the patron left with her stack of books. "Have I started a trend?" He pointed toward the sunglasses hooked onto the front of his shirt.

"What? No—"

"Is my complexion glowing too brightly to be seen by the naked eye?"

"I went to the eye doctor, and they dilated my eyes," Ezra answered blandly.

"Well, that's not nearly as flattering. Still. . . ." AJ put on his own glasses and leaned back in his chair, smirking at Ezra. "Solidarity."

Ezra side-eyed AJ as he logged into his computer. "No need to make such a fuss."

"Who's making a fuss?" A patron commanded AJ's attention for the next several minutes, but he turned back to Ezra immediately afterward. "Are your eyes all right?" he asked, his tone less teasing.

"They'll be back to normal soon. It was just a routine appointment."

"That's good."

A patron deposited a stack of graphic novels in front of Ezra and pulled out their wallet to locate their library card amid a welter of credit cards and old receipts. Ezra's gaze darted between the patron and AJ, who still wore his shades as he typed an email. Ezra wondered why more advertising campaigns for sunglasses did not depict their models as librarians writing emails about circulation statistics. He couldn't imagine that any consumer could encounter such an ad and not want to take a closer look. At the glasses, of course.

The patron departed with their graphic novels, leaving Ezra without the distraction of customer service to curtail his furtive peeks at AJ. Eventually, AJ caught him looking and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Ezra grasped for words and lighted on a compliment. "Your sunglasses look good."

"They do the job." AJ took off the glasses and examined them. "I actually have several pairs of these. If I break one, there's a replacement ready and waiting."

"You must like them."

"Sure." AJ pulled a cloth from his pocket and rubbed it across the lenses. "Eyes are the windows to the soul, so it pays to have a good pair of curtains. For privacy," he added, holding the glasses away from his face and looking through them at Ezra. He held out the shades in one hand. "Do you want to give them a try?"

"Are you sure?" Ezra hesitated.

"You said you liked how they looked," AJ replied with a shrug. "Maybe you want a pair for yourself."

As with the Bentley, Ezra had no particular interest in AJ's facial accessories. If he encountered a display of the sunglasses at the mall, for instance, he would be as likely to purchase a pair as he would be to pass a bookstore without going inside. The person behind the lenses and the steering wheel intrigued him far more.

Nevertheless, he figured that there was no harm in accepting AJ's offer. "All right." He removed his own sunglasses, squinting as the light hit his still sensitive pupils, and reached for his coworker's shades. As Ezra put them on his face, he could sense the warmth from AJ's skin that lingered on the frames.

Ezra opened the front-facing camera on his phone, but he was too disoriented to evaluate how the glasses looked on him. All he could think about was how oddly intimate it felt to wear an item that he had come to perceive almost as an extension of AJ's body.

He looked across the desk to where AJ sat scrutinizing him. "I can't tell if they suit you or not," AJ said. "I've seen them on myself so many times that seeing them on you just feels wrong, like we tried to swap faces or something."

"Well, that's not very encouraging." After one more unfocused glance at his camera, Ezra returned the glasses to AJ, who again slipped them over his eyes. Ezra hoped that he hadn't left any sweat on the nose pads or earpieces.

"You're much better off with your own face," agreed AJ dryly and returned to his emails.

As the afternoon waned, Ezra discovered that he no longer required the protection of his sunglasses. He reached under the desk to fetch their case from his bag.

"How are your eyes?" AJ drew up his own glasses to the top of his head.

"All better." They exchanged a friendly smile.

At this juncture, a short, grizzled man strode through the double doors, with a belligerent expression clouding his face.

"Oh god," muttered AJ. "It's Tracy's husband."

The man reached the desk before Ezra could respond. "Is Tracy around?" he addressed AJ in a gruff tone.

"She's across the hall," AJ answered. "We have a new schedule, and she doesn't work at this desk on Thursdays anymore."

The man nodded in curt acknowledgement and eyed Ezra appraisingly. "I've never seen you around here before."

Ezra stated that he was a new employee, and the man introduced himself as Sarge Shadwell. "Do you know anything about witchcraft?" he asked without preamble.

"N-no, not from personal experience," Ezra stammered.

"Do you want to expose the secrets of the occult world?"

"I . . . I'm afraid I'm awfully busy at the moment." Ezra hurriedly closed the game of solitaire that was open on his computer.

With a disappointed frown, Sarge plunged his hands into the pockets of his weathered khaki coat. "Ah, well, it was worth a try. I'm an independent scholar," he explained, "and I'm in need of a research assistant."

"Is that so?" Ezra pretended to be interested.

"I've been conducting my research for decades, and I have thousands of pages of notes that need to be organized, so I can finally start writing my book. It'll be the definitive history of witchcraft," he declared proudly.

"That's . . . a broad topic."

"It'll redefine witchcraft scholarship." Sarge was gaining in enthusiasm. "Once I finish my manuscript, publishers will be lining up at my doorstep to get the rights to my work. Those bigshot university academics think they know everything, with their fancy PhDs, but they'll see the truth when I top the bestseller lists."

"How is the manuscript coming?" chimed in AJ. The question seemed innocent enough, but Sarge glowered.

"I've _told_ you that it's a painstaking process. That's why I need an assistant."

"So, you haven't actually started writing the definitive history?"

"Of course I have. It's all in my notes and up here." Sarge tapped a finger against his temple. "I compose whole chapters in my head while I'm weeding my pansy garden. When my book is published, so many people will want to read it that this library will need a whole shelf of copies. There are things in my research that people will be discussing for years." He paused for a moment as he hunted for an example. "There's the chapter about nipples, for one thing."

"About what?" Ezra thought he had misheard.

"I spent all of last year researching how people were suspected of witchcraft if they didn't have exactly two nipples. Here, let me give you some examples." Sarge produced a laptop from the backpack slung over his shoulder. "I have about a hundred different cases documented, and some of them come with illustrations. Here you are. This one's a real doozy." He turned the laptop toward Ezra, whose eyebrows shot upward as he took in the image on the screen.

"There's plenty more where that came from," continued Sarge. "Take a gander at this document about a case from the seventeenth century. A bit dry at first, but just wait until you get to page ninety." He pulled up a file on the laptop and pushed it across the desk. Ezra looked at AJ in a silent plea for assistance.

"Sorry, Sarge, but we have some other patrons who need our help." AJ gestured at the largely deserted room. "No time for nipples today."

A disgruntled Sarge closed his laptop and returned it to his bag. "You're missing a chance to get an exclusive preview of a future bestseller," he warned. "But at least now you know one way to spot a witch," he added more good-naturedly.

"I guess I've learned that I'm not a witch," Ezra quipped, attempting to humor the self-styled scholar. AJ let out a peculiar choking sound, as if a python were trying to hiss while swallowing an ostrich egg. When Ezra turned to him, he coughed dramatically and, with lips twitching, said, "A tickle in my throat." Ezra frowned.

"Well, I guess I'll be getting on to Tracy," said Sarge. "I'll be sure to drop by again when you're less busy."

AJ groaned once their visitor had departed. "Every time he comes here, I have to hear more about his never-ending work. I don't think he'll ever write the book, much less publish it."

A few more patrons trickled through the doors, and soon their shift was over. Ezra gathered his things to go home, while AJ prepared to do some additional tasks in the small staff office adjoining the fiction and tech section.

After ceding his place at the desk to the evening librarian, Ezra paused to leaf through at a few books on the shelf for newly acquired fiction. AJ, on his way to the office, stopped next to him and said, "You know, you really shouldn't reveal such confidential information."

"What are you talking about?"

"How many nipples you have. You don't want that choice tidbit to get into the wrong hands."

Ezra shot him an exasperated glance. "I was only trying to be friendly before you shooed him away."

"Don't worry. Your secret will be safe with me."

"There is no secret! I'd be far more concerned if you had assumed that I had anything _other_ than two nipples."

"I don't usually make a habit of thinking about my coworkers' nipples, but if that's what my job requires, I will gladly rise to the occasion."

"Good lord" was all Ezra could think to say.

AJ was undeterred. "The quantity of _my_ nipples, meanwhile, remains a mystery."

"The question never even crossed my mind," Ezra lied.

"You know how people always tell writers to 'show, don't tell'? Well, I'm very careful not to tell such critical details about myself."

Ezra didn't dare inquire how AJ planned to accomplish the showing portion of the writerly dictum.

"Anyhow, have a good night, Ezra!" AJ disappeared down a row of bookshelves, a spring in his step.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just driving the plot along....

Thursday morning had barely begun, yet Ezra had already lost count of the times that AJ had yawned. It seemed that whenever he chanced to look at the opposite end of the desk, he beheld AJ mid-yawn, with his eyes screwed shut and his mouth contorted into a sort of grimace. Ezra was raising a hand toward his own mouth to stifle a yawn when AJ caught his eye.

"It's contagious," remarked AJ archly.

"Huh?" Ezra mumbled as he exhaled. He lowered his hand from his mouth and reached for his thermos.

"Seeing someone yawn makes you do it yourself."

"You've been yawning all morning, so it's no wonder I've started, too." He gulped down some cocoa in the vain hope of dispelling further drowsiness.

"I only began because I saw you doing it first," AJ countered, turning back to his computer.

"What? When?"

"At the start of the shift, right after you sat down to clock in. I remember because I noticed you have this way of patting your mouth after you yawn. Very prim and proper."

Ezra didn't know whether to feel flattered or embarrassed. "I have no memory of that," he claimed as he typed the call number of a book into the library's cataloguing system. "While you were critiquing my style of yawning, I was busy doing my actual job."

"I was observing, not critiquing," AJ defended himself while scrolling through his email drafts. "If anything, I admire your commitment to yawning etiquette. After seeing me in action, you must think I'm utterly uncultured."

"Sizing up my coworkers based on their yawns is not a priority of mine."

"Well, we clearly have different priorities."

"Clearly," Ezra agreed dryly.

AJ grinned at his monitor, regarding his emails with more geniality than they had probably ever witnessed from him. "Here, proofread this email for me, will you? I'm too tired for grammar, and you look like the kind of person who knows what a subjunctive is."

"What is _that_ supposed to mean?"

"Was I wrong?"

Ezra sighed. "All right, forward it to me." He tried not to smile when the computer speakers chimed to notify him of a new email.

Upon Ezra's return from his lunch break, AJ announced that he was going to buy his own meal from the café down the road. Ezra raised no objections, but he was skeptical that his coworker would be able to procure his lunch and return to the library within the allotted thirty-five-minute break. Sure enough, AJ did not reappear at the desk until exactly forty-three minutes had elapsed. Ezra had kept count.

"You're a little bit late," he chided AJ. "I had to deal with a long line of patrons by myself." The line had consisted of only five patrons, all with simple requests, but there was no need for AJ to know such technicalities.

"I'm sure you were up to the task," replied AJ, untroubled by his tardiness. He set a cardboard drink carrier in the center of the desk and removed the largest of three cups.

"I decided to get a fresh coffee while I was there. The stuff in the break room just won't cut it today." He took a sip from the cup and pushed the remaining two drinks toward Ezra. "Here, those are for you."

"I . . . don't normally drink coffee," Ezra faltered.

"I know _that_ ," scoffed AJ, as if it were ludicrous that he would have thought otherwise. "It's hot chocolate. I didn't know if you like whipped cream on it, so I had them put some in a separate container."

"Oh," said Ezra. "You didn't need to do that."

"You do like it with whipped cream? I'll remember that for next time."

"No, I mean you didn't need to buy me anything."

AJ shrugged. "It's no big deal. My treat."

Ezra reached in his pocket for his wallet. "How much did it cost?"

"I said it was my treat, so shut up and drink your cocoa," AJ retorted. "You don't want it to get cold." He slouched back into his chair and cursed under his breath at the new emails that had overrun his inbox during his absence.

Not wishing to seem ungrateful, Ezra pulled the drinks toward him and removed then from their carrier. Inside the lighter of the two cups he found a plastic spoon stuck in a heap of whipped cream.

"Did you have them put a spoon in this one?" he inquired.

"Oh, I did that," said AJ. "It's for moving the stuff to your cocoa."

"That's very considerate of you." Ezra wasted no time in wielding the spoon to pile all of the whipped cream onto his cocoa, until the mound of cream was half as tall as the cup beneath it.

AJ, meanwhile, responded to Ezra's thanks with a dismissive wave of his hand.

The cocoa was just the right temperature, but an influx of nervous energy drove Ezra to down it quickly, without stopping to enjoy the flavor. It was a pity, because for some inexplicable reason, he had wanted this to be the best hot chocolate that he'd ever tasted.

On Friday, Ezra arrived at work in high spirits, remembering how he and AJ, fueled by their drinks, had chatted throughout the previous afternoon and then lingered in the staff area after their shift to finish their conversation.

His good mood sustained him through several hours at the nonfiction desk, where patrons asked incomprehensible reference questions and grew irate when Ezra informed them that their armloads of DVDs exceeded the library's limit of twenty-five per person.

His day concluded with some tasks at his personal desk in the staff area. He was wrestling with the wording of an email and fighting the urge to forward it to AJ for proofreading when he felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. He soon saw that Ana was at the other end of the line.

"Hi, Ezra" she greeted him when he answered. "Sorry about this, but I can't pick you up today."

"That's fine," he reassured her. "Is everything all right?"

"Newton had an accident, and he wants me to take him to the doctor."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Newton was Ana's fiancé. This was not the first time that his ongoing feud with digital technology had escalated into physical violence.

"He should be fine. He says my tablet gave him an electric shock when he picked it up from the couch, so he dropped it right onto his foot and might have broken something. And then when he was hopping around on one foot, he tripped over our new Roomba and had a nasty fall."

"Oh, no, that's . . . dreadful." Despite his genuine sympathy for Newton, Ezra felt like a demon for wanting to laugh at the mental image of Ana's gangly, bespectacled partner brought low by a vacuum.

"The man's hopeless with technology, Ezra. We all know it. I've forbidden him to go near that high-tech blender I just bought."

"Probably for the best. Anyway, I'll get an Uber back home. Don't worry about me."

Once Ezra clocked out for the day, he gathered his things and wandered toward the break room, navigating the Uber app as he walked.

"Heading somewhere exciting?"

Ezra twisted around to lock eyes with AJ, who stood only a couple of feet behind him.

"Sorry, couldn't help noticing Uber on your phone," AJ clarified when Ezra didn't respond. Words had ebbed away from him, and an eternity seemed to pass before they flowed back into his grasp.

"No, nothing exciting. My neighbor can't pick me up today, so I'm getting a ride home."

AJ's expression brightened, and he lifted his chin with an air of determination. "Put your phone away. I'll give you a lift."

"You don't need to do that," Ezra stammered, but his hand had already assumed a mind of its own and was slipping his phone back into his pocket.

"Ezra, there are plenty of things I don't need to do, but I do them anyway because I want to."

"Well, I appreciate it. That's awfully nice of you."

"It's not _nice_." AJ expelled the word from his mouth like an unexpectedly foul-tasting bite of food. "I just enjoy the pure selfishness of doing what I want, when I want."

"But, in this case, you want to be nice."

"Do you want to walk home? Because that's what you might be doing if you stick to this topic."

"I was only trying to thank you," grumbled Ezra as they reached the delivery room. "It was a compliment." He retrieved his coat from its hanger.

"Compliments only work when they're something the other person would like to hear," AJ asserted as he donned his own coat. "For instance: 'You're always very neatly dressed, and your politeness is endearing.'"

Ezra halted in the middle of twining his plaid scarf around his neck. "Wait, are you talking about _me_?"

"You're also so absurdly humble that you can't tell when someone's paying you a compliment." AJ wrenched open the door, letting in a gust of frigid wind. "After you."

The Bentley presided regally over the back corner of the parking lot, isolated from the more unassuming vehicles that clustered nearer the library's entrance. Ezra hoped that AJ did not intend to give him a tour of the car's mechanical marvels while they stood shivering in the cold. Not that he would be so rude as to refuse such an invitation. If AJ wanted to tell him about paint finishes and carburetors in the middle of an apocalyptic gale, he would simply pull his coat more tightly around him and not utter a word of protest. Besides, he could always huddle closer to AJ for warmth if the situation became truly dire.

Ezra began to prepare for the worst when AJ indicated the Bentley with a sweeping gesture and asked, "Beautiful, isn't it?" Nonetheless, Ezra's readiness for technical tours and emergency huddling came to naught, since AJ proceeded to slide into the driver's seat without any further comments other than "Get in!"

After the briefest moment of hesitation, Ezra opened the passenger side door and eased himself into the front seat. His cursory observations of black leather upholstery, empty coffee cups, and piles of CD cases orbited like satellites around the awareness that he was now sitting next to AJ Crowley, in AJ's Bentley, without the barrier of work between them.

Of course, there was nothing special about having a coworker give him a ride home. It was all completely, wonderfully normal.

AJ jingled his keys. "Anywhere else you need to go? Grocery store . . . bar . . . airport?"

Ezra should his head in bewilderment at these options. "Does it look as if I'm heading to the airport?"

"How am I supposed to know? Maybe you pack very lightly." AJ tilted his head to the side and peered at Ezra through narrowed eyes. "On second thought, that doesn't sound quite right."

"I just have to get home."

"All right," AJ answered in a begrudging tone that made Ezra wonder for one impulsive second if an impromptu trip to the airport were not totally out of the question.

"What's your address?" AJ went on. "Do you know the way, or should we use GPS?"

"I know the way. It only takes ten minutes or so. Make a left out of the parking lot."

"You got it." AJ put the key in the ignition but paused before turning it. "Important question: do you like Queen?"

"As in . . . the band?"

"Yes, as in the band." Eyebrows raised, he awaited Ezra's response.

"I don't dislike them," Ezra answered truthfully, though he couldn't recall the last time he had voluntarily listened to a Queen song.

"That'll have to do for now." AJ turned the key in the ignition, and the car burst into life. His hand roved over the dashboard, activating the heating system and skipping ahead on a CD that was already slotted into the player. Familiar lyrics filtered through the speakers: _Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?_

"You know this song, right?" AJ questioned Ezra.

"Yes, 'Bohemian Rhapsody.'"

"Good, I don't have to eject you from my car and forget I ever knew you."

Breathing a hidden sigh of relief that he had avoided such a ghastly fate, Ezra peered more closely at the CDs that were wedged into the center console next to him. All of them appeared to feature Queen.

He looked up at AJ. "I guess I don't need to ask if you like Queen."

One side of AJ's mouth quirked upward. "You don't need to, but do you want to?" He slid his sunglasses over his eyes, even though the sky had been overcast all day, and put the car into gear. "Let's get out of here."

As soon as they pulled out of the parking lot, AJ accelerated the Bentley to what Ezra considered an excessive speed. "Aren't you going a bit fast?" He raised his voice to be heard above Freddie Mercury's singing.

"What's that?" AJ turned down the music.

"You're speeding!"

"No more than normal," responded AJ after a casual glance at the speedometer.

"Just because it's normal doesn't make it safe."

AJ turned his head toward Ezra. "Relax; you'll get home in one piece."

"Look where you're going!" Ezra resisted the inclination to grasp AJ by the chin—gently, of course—and direct his eyes back toward the road. "You should make a right at this light."

AJ put on his blinker and rounded the turn with a rapidity that nearly sent Ezra flying onto AJ's lap. His shoulder knocked against AJ's and he yanked himself back into his seat, sitting rigidly with his hands braced against the leather cushion.

"Oh my god, _relax_ ," AJ repeated. When this command did nothing to relieve Ezra's visible tension, AJ adopted a new tactic: "Listen, if I crash the car and get you killed, you have my full permission to haunt me as much as you like. You can kick out chairs from under me, pull the sheets off me while I sleep. All sorts of fun."

Ezra pushed aside the peculiar emotions that arose at this vision of spectral cohabitation. "I would much rather be alive and healthy, thank you."

"Suit yourself."

"Besides, if I die as a result of your driving, then there's a good chance that you'll die, too."

"Then we'll do the haunting together. Team effort. I'll fuck up people's lives, and you can miraculously make things right again."

Ezra frowned. "I don't know where you came up with that idea."

"Yeah, you're right; I wouldn't like to spend the afterlife with me either."

"No, no," said Ezra hurriedly. "I mean that I don't see you going around ruining people's lives now, so I don't know why you'd start doing it as a ghost."

A moment passed before AJ replied, "That's kind of you to say."

"So, I can be nice, but you can't?"

"Just take the goddamn compliment, Ezra."

Ezra sat in mollified silence before he had to resume giving directions. "You can merge onto the expressway here and then take the first exit off."

The Bentley swooped through the expressway traffic like a blackbird showing off its flying prowess to a potential mate. Stealing another glance at AJ, Ezra admired how effortlessly his coworker drove, with his elbow propped against the door frame and one black-gloved hand wrapped loosely around the wheel, scarcely seeming to control it. Intermittent illumination from the passing streetlights reflected off his sunglasses and threw shadows under his jaw. The greatest hits of Queen still coursed through the speakers, the drama of the music giving the whole experience a slightly surreal quality.

 _Is this the real life?_ was an appropriate question, indeed.

Ezra's home was less than a mile away from the exit. "Do you have any roommates?" asked AJ as they turned into the apartment complex.

"No, I live alone. My books keep me company," he added while directing AJ through the maze of buildings. "How about you?"

"Just me and my houseplants. My apartment complex is off the next exit."

They reached Ezra's building before the conversation could progress. AJ pulled into a parking space close to the entrance, and Ezra felt a twinge of reluctance as he unbuckled his seatbelt. "Well, thank you for the ride."

"Wait a minute." AJ fished his phone out of his pocket and opened his contact list. "Do you want to give me your number? You know, in case you need another ride."

"Oh, right! Sure!" Ezra cringed inwardly at the giddy tone that had crept into his voice. He traded his phone for AJ's and typed out his name and number on the unfamiliar keyboard. His thumbs trembled the tiniest bit as he triple-checked each letter and digit.

"Do you have all your things?" AJ asked once they had completed the exchange, leaving their intermingled fingerprints dotted across both screens.

Ezra glanced down at his phone, which was still open to a freshly created contact page for "AJC." "Yes, I think so. Thanks again, and good night!" He finally opened the door and stepped into the cold, dreary parking lot.

"Have a good weekend," called AJ, and then the car door was shut, and Ezra was fumbling in his pocket for his keys. On a whim, he turned around to wave goodbye before entering the building, and AJ, still parked in the same spot, waved back.

Later that night, Ezra sat on his couch with a bowl of strawberry ice cream, surfing through the channels on his TV. He happened upon a show about restoring old cars and, out of habit, flipped to the next channel. Nonetheless, he doubled back to the car program when he realized that, during his split second of viewing, he had glimpsed a shiny black vehicle that resembled AJ's Bentley. As it turned out, the car was not a Bentley at all, but Ezra did not change the channel.

He continued eating his ice cream as the camera panned across the restored interior of the car. One of the hosts climbed into the driver's seat, stroking the newly added leather, and Ezra's mind jumped to AJ's hand gripping the gear shift with practiced confidence and then caressingly encircling the steering wheel of the Bentley, instinctively knowing just the right amount of pressure to apply.

With his eyes glued to the screen, Ezra forgot about the spoonful of ice cream that he had just gathered up. He held the spoon suspended in midair, halfway to his mouth. Melted ice cream dripped off the tip of the utensil.

His phone vibrated.

Ezra jumped in his seat, his spoon clattered back into the bowl, and he scrambled for the phone where it lay on the other end of the couch. The call was from Ana.

"Hey, Ezra."

"Hi, Ana," answered Ezra with unnecessary enthusiasm. "How's Newton?"

"Oh, he'll be fine. He's seen worse. Did you get home all right?"

"Yes," Ezra said, hoping he sounded nonchalant. "I got a ride with a coworker."

"That tall guy with the black coat?"

"Um, yes, I think that's him. How did you know?"

"You've come out of work together a few times. What's his name?"

"AJ. AJ Crowley." Some garbled noises emanated from Ana's end of the line.

"Hold on a minute. What's that, Newton?" Ana stepped away to confer with her fiancé and then returned to the phone. "Sorry, Ezra, what did you say? His last name's Crawly?"

"No, Crowley. Crow, like the bird. He's very nice." Ezra smiled to himself over how irritated AJ would be over that remark.

"Well, good on you for making a friend. I'll see you on Monday morning." Ana hung up, and Ezra returned to the soupy mess that had been his ice cream.

He supposed that Ana was right. AJ Crowley was his coworker and now, apparently, his friend, and that was all he needed to be. But, as AJ himself had indicated, what Ezra needed wasn't necessarily what he wanted.


	6. Chapter 6

"So, what kind of car does your coworker drive?"

Ana's question tugged Ezra out of a reverie. "Sorry, what did you say?"

"Your friend AJ, what kind of car does he drive?"

"Oh, that," Ezra said, as if AJ and his automobile were the furthest things from his mind. "It's actually a Bentley."

"What? Really? Is the guy rich?"

"I don't think so, at least not personally wealthy. He said he got it from a family member."

"God, I wish I could commute to work in a Bentley," Ana mused. "If you two ever take a ride and need some company, save a spot for me in the back seat."

Ezra doubted that he would require company on future rides with AJ, assuming that any such outings ever occurred. Nevertheless, he assured Ana that he would think of her if the occasion arose.

"Will you be working together today?" she asked as they pulled into the library parking lot.

"No, I don't often run into him on Mondays." Ezra craned his neck to scan the back corners of the lot, earning him a perceptive glance from his friend.

"Is his car there?" was her next inquiry.

"How did you— No, he must not be here yet."

They pulled up near the staff entrance. "Have a good day," Ana wished him. "Agnes Nuttall said we're finally going to get some nice weather."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"She predicted that it'll be a very enjoyable week."

"She should stick to forecasting the weather," Ezra grumbled. He climbed out of the vehicle into the undeniably mild spring morning.

"She _does_. What did _you_ think she was talking about?"

"Nothing at all. I'll see you later, Ana." He shut the car door.

Toward the end of his shift, Ezra left the desk to reshelve a stack of books that a patron had abandoned on one of the study room tables. His return trip to the desk was occupied by thoughts of the spaghetti that he planned to prepare for dinner that night. He had sadly undercooked his last batch of pasta and was determined not to repeat the mistake. Perhaps this train of thought explained why his heart felt as though it had been scraped by a shard of uncooked spaghetti when he discovered that AJ was now sitting in his desk chair.

"Hello" was Ezra's somewhat breathless response to his coworker's wave of greeting. "Why are you in my seat?"

"Why not? I don't see a plaque with your name on it. Anyway"—he stood up as Ezra joined him behind the desk—"did you get my text?"

"I . . . I don't think so." Ezra was, in fact, absolutely certain that he hadn't received any texts from AJ over the weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, his phone had rarely left his hand or his pocket, as if failing to catch every notification within ten seconds after its arrival would bring about the end of the world. Still, he was unlikely to have seen the text if AJ had sent it during the past few hours. "I haven't looked at my phone in a while. I always keep it in my bag when I'm working so I don't get distracted."

"You must sleep well, knowing that you've followed every rule in the book," AJ quipped. "But never mind, no need to distract yourself with texts now. I was just asking if you want another ride home."

Avoiding distractions had become a lost cause at this point, so Ezra retrieved his phone from his bag as he answered, "No, my neighbor can give me rides again. But thank you. I appreciate it . . . and don't roll your eyes like that my thanks!" Ezra hoped that Ana's witchcraft did not give her remote access to his current thoughts, chief among which was the desire for her to suffer further inconveniences that would derail their carpooling plans.

Ana did not long remain at the forefront of his mind, however. When he checked his phone, a text from AJC was the first notification that appeared. The message, sent one hour ago, consisted simply of a car emoji and a question mark.

Ezra would have rather given himself a papercut than reveal to AJ how charming he found this missive. "You couldn't have written it out as a complete sentence?"

"Graphic novels count as literature, too."

Ezra typed a reply. "There, I answered."

AJ had opened the text before Ezra even finished speaking. "Is the sad face supposed to represent you or me?"

"I didn't give it that much thought."

"A general air of ruefulness, then. All right, at least I know you received it." AJ pushed his phone into his back pocket. "So, what happened to your neighbor last week?"

"Her fiancé had an accident. Nothing too serious. He doesn't get along well with technology."

"Perhaps he could use our library's tech tutoring services? I'm always available to lend a hand," AJ declared in his most winning customer service voice.

"Maybe, but it's not just that he lacks the knowledge. He touches any kind of computer, and it goes haywire." Ezra wished that he himself were technologically illiterate and on the receiving end of whatever hand AJ had to lend.

By this time, another librarian had arrived to take Ezra's place for the evening shift, so he collected his belongings and exited the nonfiction section, with AJ in tow. A patron approached them as they reached the landing.

Hi, sorry about that," she said, pointing toward a splash of brown liquid on the faux marble floor. "I spilled my coffee and wiped up most of it, but it's still a little wet." She held up a damp wad of paper towels from the public restroom.

"We'll take care of it," Ezra reassured her. The patron vanished down the staircase, happy to relinquish responsibility for the mess, while Ezra and AJ walked across the landing to the janitor's closet. The lock on the closet door made a beeping sound as AJ opened it with his key fob and stepped into the narrow space within.

Ezra remained in the doorway. "It's very cramped in here," he observed, surveying the assortment of cleaning supplies that lined the walls.

AJ tore some paper towels from a roll on a shelf and handed them to Ezra. "Just room enough for one person."

"Or two."

AJ threw him a sidelong glance. "If you're feeling sociable." He picked up a yellow plastic "Wet Floor" sign and turned to leave the closet.

"I meant that there are usually two janitors here," Ezra tried to clarify, although he had only just now remembered the pair of custodians who worked at the library.

"Right." AJ raised an eyebrow. "Let's finish up here before you increase the capacity to three."

As they completed their cleaning duties, an older woman with dyed blonde hair and brightly colored lipstick appeared in the entrance to the fiction and tech section. "There you are, AJ!" she exclaimed. "I need some help with my computer. It says it has to do updates, and I don't know what to click."

"I'll be there in a minute, Tracy." AJ returned his attention to Ezra and nudged the "Wet Floor" sign with his foot. "I hope all this didn't make you late for your ride."

"It's fine. Ana's very patient."

"But I bet she doesn't drive a Bentley."

"No, of course not. It's some kind of SUV."

"Meaning that I could drive circles around it."

"It's a commute, not a race," Ezra protested.

"That's what _you_ think."

"Well, at least Ana doesn't speed like you do."

"Ezra, I was not speeding. I've sped before, and I guarantee that you haven't seen anything yet."

"I sincerely hope no one else was on the road during your actual speeding. What were you doing, ninety miles per hour? A hundred?"

AJ pursed his lips and quirked his head from side to side as he considered this estimate, but the lurid details of his traffic violations failed to intrigue Tracy. "I need to get home and make dinner," she interjected, "so could we look at my computer now, dear?"

Reluctance flickered across AJ's features. "Sure, let's go. Have a fun ride home in your mediocre sports utility vehicle," he teased Ezra as he turned to follow Tracy.

"Good luck defying death!" Ezra called back. 

On the following day, Ezra visited the break room to eat his lunch of leftover (and, fortunately, well-cooked) spaghetti. The only other occupant of the room was Adam, one of the library's teenage pages, whom Ezra often saw roaming around the building as he shelved books and videos. The boy now pored over a magazine and paid no attention to Ezra.

While his container of pasta rotated around the staff microwave, Ezra unlocked his phone and noticed at once that he had received a text from AJ half an hour ago. His stomach lurched in a way that he attempted to brush off as hunger.

The message was a picture of a library book, or, more specifically, of AJ's hand holding a library book. Several moments passed before Ezra's brain grew calm enough to perceive that the book was a cozy mystery entitled _Christmas Cocoa Murder_. The cozy mystery genre was always popular among the library's elderly patrons; AJ must have spotted the book on a cart of recently returned items. Along with the picture, AJ had written, _Cocoa murder is what you would do if you got too angry with me for speeding._

Ezra turned toward the microwave to hide his smile from Adam, an unnecessary precaution, since the page had eyes only for his magazine. He typed back: _Where does the Christmas part come in?_

AJ responded almost instantaneously, ignoring Ezra's question. _Are you looking at your phone during work???_

_No! I'm at lunch._

_Where are you?_

_Break room._

A read receipt popped up under the text, and a few minutes later, just as Ezra was removing his pasta from the microwave, AJ strolled into the room, his phone in one hand and a half-eaten sandwich in the other.

"I was taking my break in the staff room upstairs. What are you eating?"

"Spaghetti. It's leftovers." Ezra took a seat at one of the three tables in the room and pulled out the silverware he had brought from home.

"Eating tomato sauce while wearing a white shirt. You're quite the risk-taker." AJ leaned against the wall facing Ezra and bit into his sandwich.

"I'm very careful," Ezra insisted. He waved his fork at the table. "Are you going to sit down?"

"I was sitting all morning. I want to stretch my legs."

"It makes me nervous to eat while you're looming over me like that."

"I'm several feet away from you. This hardly qualifies as looming. But have it your way." He slid into the chair opposite Ezra's and stretched out his legs under the table. The toes of their shoes collided, and Ezra, startled by the sudden contact, narrowly avoided depositing a forkful of spaghetti onto his lap.

"What's in your sandwich?" he asked after he had gulped down the pasta.

"I think it's roast beef." AJ lifted what remained of the bread to confirm the filling. "Yeah, it is. I was half asleep this morning when I made it." He ate the remainder of the sandwich in one big bite. "Dammit, I forgot to bring my coffee."

"There's always water." Ezra nodded toward the fountain built into the wall, where he had refilled his empty cocoa thermos before heating his pasta.

"What a novel idea. I'll consider it."

Adam suddenly lifted his head from his magazine. "Could you guys be a little quieter, please? I'm trying to concentrate. This is really important stuff." He indicated the cover of his reading material, where Ezra could just make out the word _Aquarius_. "Like, I'm trying to figure out how to save the environment—maybe even the entire _world_ —and you're over here talking about your lunches."

"Sorry to disturb you," Ezra said demurely, while AJ threw a doubtful glance at the magazine. Adam must have sensed his skepticism, because he addressed AJ in a grave tone: "I've seen your car. Do you know the amount of carbon emissions that thing releases?"

"Not a clue," admitted AJ, without evincing much concern about the matter. Adam grimaced expressively.

"Corporations are pumping out more carbon emissions every day than my Bentley could produce in a lifetime," AJ argued. "They're the ones who should be worried, not me." He turned to Ezra. "See, that's why I drive so fast. It cuts back on the amount of time I'm out there emitting greenhouse gasses."

"I don't think that's how it works."

"He's right," Adam chimed in.

AJ crossed his arms. "Next time I'll eat my lunch upstairs in peace, where I won't be accused of singlehandedly causing climate change."

"I never accused you of anything," Ezra objected.

"You've insinuated that I'm a menace to society because of a few extra miles per hour."

"You're the one who keeps bringing it up!"

Adam slapped his magazine onto the table. "Oh my god, can you please stop bickering?" he groaned. "You guys are like an old married couple or something."

Ezra affixed his gaze to his lunch, as if it were now imperative that he count exactly how many strands of spaghetti remained in his microwave-safe container. Uncomfortable silence reigned until AJ pushed back his chair and stood up. "My lunch break's about to end. I'd better head back upstairs." Ezra forced himself to look up from his meal, his eyes making only a couple of small detours as they ascended to AJ's face.

"Do you normally have lunch here on . . . what day is it . . . Tuesday?" AJ inquired.

"Yes, usually." Ezra gripped his fork more tightly as he added, "If you ever want to stop by. . . ."

"Maybe I will, as long as my Bentley and I don't need to file harassment complaints afterward," AJ said dryly. "By the way, Ezra, you have a spot of sauce right under your lip." He tapped the corresponding area on his own face. "Thought you might want to know before facing the public again."

Ezra raised a hand to his mouth. "Oh, thanks for noticing," he stammered, certain that his face had grown so red that the patch of sauce was now scarcely visible.

"Any time." AJ continued toward the doorway, "I'll see you on Thursday for our weekly rendezvous. Bye, Adam." The page nodded curtly at him.

Once AJ had departed, Ezra rose to use the staff bathroom and caught Adam giving him a knowing grin. "What?" Ezra asked, with more sharpness than he had intended.

Adam shrugged and returned to his magazine.

On Wednesday night, Ezra settled in to read _Christmas Cocoa Murder_ before bed. Curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had snuck into the fiction stacks that afternoon to grab the book, after double-checking that AJ was not scheduled to work in the vicinity.

Despite his secret fondness for cozy mysteries, and for certain people who sent him unsolicited book pictures, he felt tired from work and started dozing off within the first twenty pages. He reached for his phone to set his morning alarm, seeing as he did so that Ana had sent him a text: _Thinking of buying some coffee before work tomorrow. Do you want to come with me? We'll have to leave a bit earlier than usual._

Ezra agreed, and they settled on a time.

When morning dawned, he realized that he now had a chance to repay AJ for buying his cocoa last week. He perched on the edge of his bed and typed out a text, glad that the need to meet Ana prevented him from dithering overlong about the message's wording.

_I'm stopping by the coffee shop before work. Would you like me to get you anything?_

AJ did not respond immediately, but when Ezra finished assembling his lunch, he found new messages on his phone. _I just woke up_ , AJ had written. _One large black coffee. Thanks._

 _I'll get your coffee_ , Ezra promised, just as he assured himself that he would eventually stop picturing a newly awake AJ lying in bed reading his texts.

AJ had not yet arrived at work when Ezra reached the fiction and tech desk, carrying a large coffee and a large hot chocolate, with no whipped cream this time. Ana had asked him so many awkward questions about why he was buying the coffee that he had inadvertently told the barista that he didn't want whipped cream. He set the drinks together on the desk and busied himself with reorganizing one of the nearby book displays.

As Ezra ensured that all of the books on the display were symmetrically arranged, AJ walked through the double doors, carrying bags under his eyes. "Where's my coffee?" were the first words that emerged from his mouth.

Ezra gestured toward the desk with the book he was holding. "Over there."

AJ was habitually a fast walker, but the speed with which he moved to the desk was exceptional even by his own standards. After appearing to cover fifteen feet in a single stride, he plucked one of the cups from the desk. "Thanks for this, Ezra. I owe you one."

Ezra was about to remonstrate that he was the one who had owed AJ something, making further favors superfluous, but he paused upon seeing how AJ frowned over his first sip of coffee.

"What's wrong? Is it not good?" Satisfied with the aesthetics of the book display, he returned to the desk and picked up the second cup.

"No, it's fine," AJ told him. "Go ahead and have some of yours."

Ezra's face scrunched up in disgust when he tasted the drink. "Ugh, I think there's coffee in there! Tastes like how I imagine it would be to lick one of those grimy board books we offer for toddlers. Did they make a mistake at the café?" He inspected the label on the side of the cup.

AJ suppressed a grin. "No, it was me. I took your cocoa by accident. Here, they're the same size. We can switch the lids."

Before he could stop himself, Ezra proposed an alternative: "They're both filled to the brim. I don't want to spill anything on the desk. . . . I haven't been sick lately. Have you?"

"No. . . ." AJ looked at the cup in his hand. "Oh, what the hell, why not? I'm sure you have clean habits. In fact, I doubt whether you have any germs at all. Here you go, one hot chocolate."

Ezra couldn't determine if the spark of energy he felt came from the unaccustomed caffeine zinging through his veins or from the brush of his fingertips against AJ's as he took his cocoa. Either way, he felt ready to reorganize every bookshelf in the building and assist an entire army of ornery patrons.

AJ, meanwhile, reached for his coffee and drained half of it as he settled into his chair, evidently impervious to the heat of the beverage. "I told you I'd corrupt you with caffeine."

"I seem to recall that you said you wouldn't dream of it," Ezra retorted while he logged into his computer.

"Why do you remember all the little things I said weeks ago, hm?"

"Well, you did say that I had a good memory."

"You must, because most of the time I can't even recall what I said yesterday."

"I can't believe I need to work an entire shift with you when you're in this mood."

AJ smirked at his computer and shot back in an undertone, "Oh, I think you want to."

Ezra would have refuted this claim, but he had always been an abysmal liar.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kind of went off about how wonderful libraries are, and I have no regrets.

On Sunday night, Ezra stared into the depths of the soup warming on his stovetop and then proofread a text to AJ for approximately the twelfth time.

This additional reading was unlikely to reveal any hitherto unseen errors in the phrase "Good evening!" Still, it never hurt to be cautious, even when initiating a friendly conversation.

Ezra forced himself to send the text before he could embark on a thirteenth round of proofreading, which would inevitably have led to a fourteenth to avoid any ill luck attached to the number thirteen. Once the message was marked as delivered, he nearly tossed the phone into the soup pot in his haste to get the device out of his grasp, like a demon frantically trying to unhand a bottle of holy water. Clearly, his text exchanges with AJ during the workweek had not quite dampened his nerves.

Urging himself to be more sensible, Ezra set his phone on the kitchen counter and continued to prepare his meal. The challenge of making room for his dinner dishes amid the books on his table provided some welcome distraction. Nonetheless, the buzz of a notification had him moving toward his phone with a speed that would have rivalled AJ's most reckless driving.

 _Hi Ezra_ , AJ had written _._ Another message appeared seconds later: _Do you often use "good evening" in casual settings?_

 _Why not?_ Ezra typed back.

_It's so formal. Makes me think you're sitting around wearing a tux while you text._

_I don't even own a tux_. Ezra glanced down at his apparel, which, regardless of other people's questionable standards, did not meet his own criteria for formality. His domestic wardrobe consisted of slacks and Oxford shirts that he had worn for work until they had gotten stained, frayed, or otherwise unsuitable for public display. While there was no tuxedo to mock, he suspected that AJ would still have something teasing to say about how Ezra's shirts remained scrupulously buttoned until bedtime, at which point he took just as much care in buttoning up his pajama shirts.

"AJ's probably one of those people who wears only spandex at home, or underwear," Ezra muttered under his breath, although this conjecture made him uncharacteristically open-minded toward sartorial habits other than his own.

Meanwhile, AJ had responded: _Are you at least wearing one of your fancy bowties?_

 _No_ , Ezra said truthfully. _The ones I wear to work aren't my fancy ones anyway._

 _They all look fancy to me._ Ezra could hear the words spoken in AJ's wry tone.

 _What are YOU wearing?_ he asked to turn the conversation away from his neckwear preferences. Seeing that his soup was nearing a boil, he ladled some into a bowl and returned to his texts as soon as he was seated at the table. The steam rising from the soup suddenly felt frigid in comparison with the heat that engulfed Ezra's face when he read AJ's answer: _Not much, I just showered._

Several potential responses, all inappropriate for the Lord's Day, waltzed through Ezra's head. In an excess of caution, however, he decided to take AJ's words at face value and replied with a relatively innocuous update on his own activities. _I just sat down to eat dinner_.

 _Well then I won't ruin your appetite_ , AJ said after a minute.

Ezra grew so engrossed in analyzing this text, like some cryptic oracular utterance, that he almost forgot his manners and came dangerously close to slurping his soup. As he struggled to think of a message that did not involve clothing, showers, or appetites, another text from AJ popped up: _Will you still be around for lunch on Tuesday?_

Surprised that AJ had remembered his suggestion from last week, Ezra wrote back, _Of course_.

 _Text me when you're about to go on your break, and I'll join you._ Another text appeared seconds later: _Or send me an email if texting before your break is too distracting._

Ezra couldn't tell if his friend was being considerate or making fun of him, or both. AJ's third message was less ambiguous: _Send a passenger pigeon, if that's what floats your boat_.

Ezra began to roll his eyes, but feigning exasperation was more difficult when AJ was not there to see. _I can always come tell you in person_ , he wrote.

_If you have a spare moment. I'll probably be working in the upstairs office._

_I'll try to drop by sometime in the morning._

_I'll be expecting you._

Ezra's watch read 10:50 am when he reached the staff office that was tucked into the corner of the fiction and tech section. Through the glass door, he saw AJ slouched in front of the computer at his cluttered desk, bobbing his head to whatever he was streaming through his black earbuds.

AJ didn't notice Ezra's presence until they were almost within arm's reach of each other. "There you are!" AJ greeted him at last, removing the earbuds and tapping the pause button on his phone.

"Listening to more Queen?" Ezra inquired.

"Among other things. But, yes, if you want to guess what I'm listening to, Queen is always a safe bet."

"So I've gathered." Knowing that he had several tasks to complete before his break, Ezra got to the point. "I'll probably have lunch around 12:30. If you're not too busy then. . . . "

"I will busily avoid these emails while I watch you eat your lunch."

"Didn't you bring anything to eat?"

"Sure, but I can multitask." AJ glanced at the window over his desk, where sunlight spilled through the leaves of a houseplant that was set in a black pot on the sill. "How about we eat on the balcony?"

"I didn't think we'd opened it up for the season yet."

"It's not open to patrons, but there's nothing stopping us. I have the key somewhere around here."

"All right. I could use some fresh air," Ezra sighed. "I get awfully pale during the winter."

"Really?" AJ asked while trawling through one of the desk drawers. "Your cheeks always seem to have plenty of color in them, at least from my perspective."

Ezra suspected that the current condition of his face would only confirm AJ's findings. He stepped toward the door. "I'll be here at 12:30."

"Here it is." AJ isolated a key from a bunch that he had pulled from the drawer and turned back to Ezra. "I'll see you then. Don't be late."

"I am unerringly punctual."

He was late.

Ezra's watch read 12:39 by the time he arrived at the office. AJ leaned against the door, twirling the bunch of keys by their lanyard. "Whatever happened to unerring punctuality?"

"I'm sorry. I was all ready to take my break, but a patron came up at the last minute and wanted to get a new library card."

"You should have sent them downstairs to circ." The main circulation desk was where most patrons registered for cards.

"I'm not going to turn someone away just because I was supposed to meet you for lunch."

"I would have, if I was meeting you for lunch." They walked side by side toward the balcony entrance, located in the window-lined wall behind the fiction and tech desk.

"Patrons take precedence," Ezra retorted. "Besides, I'm still going to take the full thirty-five-minute break, so it makes no difference in the end."

"I can authorize you as a supervisor to take forty minutes."

"You have no supervisory authority over me, AJ."

"That's very true." AJ unlocked the balcony door and ushered Ezra into the fresh air. "Be it known that there is no power imbalance between us in this workplace."

"You don't have to get so formal about it."

"I thought you liked formality." Before AJ could shut the door, a patron hailed him from inside the building. "Is the balcony open?" she called, rising from her chair near the window, where she had been carefully observing the movements of the librarians.

"No, sorry, this is a private event," AJ rebuffed her. He closed the door before she or any other bothersome patrons could barrel through the entrance and disturb their lunch.

The balcony overlooked a section of the parking lot, bordered by a row of trees that formed the boundary of the library property. Between the tree limbs, still devoid of new foliage, Ezra could see sunlight glinting off the muddy water of the local canal. Two people in gray sweatsuits were jogging on the path that lined the far side of the canal, and Ezra wondered if AJ would ever want to stroll there with him, perhaps during the summer, when the sun was still out after work. Ezra drew the line at jogging, however. Not even the image of AJ dressed in form-fitting athletic wear was sufficient motivation for Ezra to take up jogging.

AJ led the way to a pair of brightly colored Adirondack chairs that kept watch over the balcony. Ezra perched on the edge of his orange chair, while AJ reclined against his purple-painted seatback and crossed his legs comfortably. "I stopped by the sub shop before work," he commented as he reached into the paper bag under his arm. The sub that he extracted was large, but he demolished at least a quarter of it in two swift bites. Ezra produced his own sandwich, which he had made at home the night before, and nibbled on it daintily, dismayed that the speed of AJ's eating matched that of his driving.

AJ remained unaware that he had breached any code of mealtime etiquette. "I asked for extra jalapeños, and the shop did not deliver," he complained, subjecting his sub to a withering look.

" _Extra_ jalapeños? Wouldn't that ruin the sandwich?"

"Not for me it wouldn't." AJ noted Ezra's distaste and added with amusement, "I take it you don't like spicy food?"

"No, not much. I like to be able to taste what I'm eating without feeling as if my mouth is on fire."

"That's where we disagree. I like my mouth to feel as if it's a portal to hell."

Ezra was more inclined to view AJ's mouth as a portal to heaven, but he kept that opinion to himself. "I enjoy seasoning in moderation," he stated, convinced that he was on the reasonable side of this dispute.

"What sort of moderately seasoned foods do you enjoy?"

Ezra's answer did not require much thought. "Crepes are my favorite food."

"How very refined, though I guess I shouldn't be surprised about that."

Ezra brushed past the teasing. "I tried them years ago at a French restaurant and thought they were just scrumptious. I've never really been able to stop thinking about them. There's a place down the road that makes good crepes, but they're expensive and I try to limit how often I go."

"I don't need to go to a restaurant," AJ said nonchalantly. "I can make them." He took another enormous bite of his sandwich, apparently willing to overlook its flaws.

Ezra watched him chew in disbelief. "Really? You can make crepes? From scratch? Do they have jalapeños in them or something?" he asked, trying to find the downside to this seeming miracle.

"I've never made them with jalapeños, but I'm sure you'll be the first in line if I ever do," said AJ with a grin. "I've tried a few different fillings. It's just something I've taught myself over the years." He nodded toward the sandwich that hung neglected from Ezra's hand, only three small bites taken from it. "Better eat up if you want to finish that before the end of your carefully timed break."

"Right." He stared at AJ over the top of his sandwich and spoke as soon he had consumed a fourth bite: "Why did you learn to make crepes, of all things?"

"Pure spite," AJ answered matter-of-factly around a mouthful of food. He swallowed and, seeing Ezra's confused frown, elaborated: "I saw a guy on one of those cooking shows acting like he was some culinary god because he could make good crepes. Seriously, he talked as if everyone should be getting on their knees and worshipping him because he knew how to mix a few ingredients into a batter and swirl it properly around a pan."

"It can't be that easy."

AJ shrugged. "It's a bit harder than it looks, but not by much. Anyhow, I hate people who lord it over me like that, even if they're not addressing me personally, so I decided to show the motherfucker up and teach myself."

"I hope _you_ don't start lording it over people."

"I can't promise anything. If someone wants to get on their knees and worship me for my crepe-making abilities, I wouldn't necessarily object," AJ remarked, reaching for his thermos and darting a glance at Ezra as he tilted his head back to catch the last drops of his coffee.

The piece of sandwich in Ezra's mouth became very dry, and he had to gulp down some water before he could bring himself to reply, "I guess it would depend on the person."

"Naturally."

Suddenly eager to redirect the conversation, Ezra said, "About your learning to make crepes. . . . I don't know if that's spite, exactly. You're just competitive."

"Whatever you want to call it. I don't like people claiming authority over me. I want to be my own authority."

"Don't let Pepper hear you say that."

"She wouldn't mind. Besides, libraries don't count. They're all about breaking rules and undermining authority."

Ezra felt disconcerted by the idea of himself as a fomenter of unrest. "We're not revolutionaries, AJ. We mostly just help people borrow books and use computers."

"But think about it. Books and tech cost money in most other contexts. Society says that you should buy your own computer, and if you want to read books, then you need to buy yourself new ones, and only ones from the specific authors that the publishing industry wants you to see at the bookstore. Libraries defy all of that. Everything's free here, or as close to free as we can get. If you never want to own a computer, then the library can help you. If you want to read some book that the stores don't carry because it's too old or obscure, then we can get you that book. There's so much pressure to put a price on information, but we don't. And look at the wide range of people we serve, all with the same level of care. Well, unless they're assholes. But my point still stands."

"I just never thought of libraries as places to break rules. Being a librarian feels very . . . safe to me, though I understand what you're saying."

AJ looked at him thoughtfully. "What do you mean by 'safe'?"

Ezra tried to collect his thoughts. "Just . . . being able to surround myself with things I love, like books, and being able to help other people find those things, too. To me, libraries aren't places to be any sort of rebel. They're places to fit in."

"But what if you _are_ being a rebel by fitting in at the library, because society isn't letting you fit in anywhere else?"

Ezra wasn't prepared to grapple with this concept in any abstract sense, so he answered AJ with another question: "Is that how it is for you?"

"Maybe. Not in any dramatic way." He smiled at Ezra. "Funny how we arrived at the same career from two different angles."

"They're not that different, all things considered," Ezra decided. He realized he had again forgotten his sandwich and took another bite, wishing he could extend their lunch break for another hour.

"Really? Why do you think so?" AJ watched him eat. "Any day now," he joked as Ezra persistently chewed his food.

"I'm not about to talk with my mouth full," Ezra protested once he had swallowed. "Anyway, what you're saying makes sense, but I also don't think you're some sort of brooding antihero."

"You don't think I'm Satan from _Paradise Lost_?"

"No, I do _not_."

"How disappointing; I'm crushed," AJ replied, sarcasm thick on his voice. "Well, I don't think you're some plaster saint either. Sure, you follow plenty of rules, but you choose them for yourself. I don't see a lot of other people believing that they need to wear a bowtie to be presentable in public."

"The way you keep talking about my bowties makes me think you want to wear one yourself."

"I would not be caught dead in one."

"So you say." Ezra popped the last bite of his lunch into his mouth.

A voice echoed up to them from the parking lot. "Hey there! Who's that on the balcony?"

Ezra and AJ rose from their seats and leaned over the railing to see Pepper standing beneath them, craning her head upward.

"Hi, Pepper. It's just us," called AJ.

Pepper waved to them. "Hello! Just wanted to make sure no patrons had got up there. Carry on." She proceeded toward her car.

"Good luck to any patrons who _do_ get caught up here before we officially open the balcony," said AJ as they watched her drive away to one of her many meetings.

"Pepper would organize a patron inquisition," joked Ezra. "But the sentence would be some stern warnings and book recommendations about respect, instead of torture."

He settled back into his seat, less rigidly this time, and peered at his watch to count the dwindling minutes of the break. AJ turned to face Ezra and leaned against the balcony railing, with his hands braced on either side of him. Ezra's gaze came to rest on the tattoo exposed by AJ's rolled-up sleeve. "When did you get your tattoo?"

"This?" AJ extended his arm. "I've had it since college. I always liked snakes. At one point, I was thinking of having one tattooed on my face."

"Your _face_?" gasped Ezra in horror, picturing some hideous reptile coiled between AJ's eyebrows or slithering over the bridge of his nose, with its tail on one cheek and its head on the other.

"Nothing big, just something small on the side of my face, like where my sideburn would be." AJ rubbed a finger against the spot in question. "I decided on my arm instead, but I might go back eventually."

"If you want," said Ezra, letting his skepticism ooze out between the words.

The sun soon disappeared behind a cloud, and a chilly breeze swept across the balcony, ruffling AJ's hair and causing Ezra to shiver. He rose from his chair with a small sigh. "We'd better go back inside."

AJ pushed himself off from the railing and looked Ezra up and down. "Do _you_ have any tattoos?"

"No, I'm afraid not." Ezra wondered why AJ had even bothered to ask, since his gaze felt piercing enough to detect even the most well-hidden ink.

"You should tell me if you ever do get one."

"You'll be the first to know," Ezra promised as he gathered his things and followed AJ back indoors.

They paused at the door to the staff office. "Are you going to buy me coffee again on Thursday?" AJ questioned him before they parted ways.

"I only bought you coffee because you got me cocoa during the previous week. You'll have to make your own coffee this week."

"You have a heart of stone."

"Says the man who likes cold-blooded reptiles."

"That doesn't mean I _am_ cold-blooded. In fact, I'd say it's quite the opposite."

"Regardless, you are not getting any coffee out of me. Actually, I think that you owe _me_ a drink, since you tricked me into trying your nasty coffee last week."

"I was only helping you expand your horizons."

"I am quite satisfied with my current view, thank you," said Ezra, raising his eyebrows at AJ.

"Well, your current view includes someone who's at least sixty percent coffee, so you should give caffeine another chance."

"To paraphrase you, I will be my own authority on the matter of coffee."

"I suppose I can't argue with my own flawless logic."

A smile tugged at Ezra's lips. "I'll let you and your flawless logic get back to work."

AJ waved his key fob over the lock on the office door and turned the door handle. "I'm glad you're satisfied with your current view, because I've enjoyed mine as well. I'll see you later, Ezra." The door swung shut behind him.

A new text appeared on Ezra's phone that evening. _Old picture, but here they are_. Attached was the image of a plate of delicate, golden brown crepes, with whipped cream and a drizzle of a sauce that was probably caramel.

Ezra immediately saved the picture onto his phone. _They look excellent. I would like to try them._

 _Maybe someday_ , AJ wrote back.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be one of my favorite chapters thus far???

The world was about to end.

At least, that was how Ezra felt as he prepared to confront a horde of overstimulated children at the library's family dance party.

The day of the event, a rainy Friday, began uneventfully enough. The only warning sign of the coming crisis appeared when Ana said during the morning commute, "I saw on Instagram that your library's doing some kind of dance thing for kids today."

"Oh, that." Ezra tore his gaze away from his phone. "One of our children's librarians organized it. I have nothing to do with it."

"You don't have to help out or anything?"

"No, I'm not involved much with children's events."

"I see. I just thought event planning might explain why you've been so glued to your phone this morning."

"I'm only texting AJ. We're figuring out when we want to have lunch."

In the two weeks that had elapsed since that first Tuesday on the balcony, his meals with AJ had become a common sight at the library. The balcony was now open to patrons during good weather, but even they had learned that the orange and purple chairs were off limits at lunchtime.

"Weren't you two texting about lunch earlier this week?" Ana inquired.

"That must have been on Tuesday." Ezra searched his memory of the past few days. "Right, because on Wednesday we made plans over email."

Ana threw him a sidelong glance while she checked the rearview mirror. "How often do you and AJ eat together?"

"Often enough," said Ezra evasively. "We couldn't do lunch yesterday because we worked at the same desk and had to stagger our breaks."

"But aside from yesterday," Ana persisted, "how many times this week have you met up?"

"Why does it matter to you?"

"I'm just curious. Don't act like I'm asking you to reveal your darkest secrets."

"Well, today will be the fourth time, I guess. But there's nothing special about meeting for lunch. It's just being friendly, that's all."

"Friendly. Of course." Sarcasm laced Ana's voice. "I'm sure you'll get even friendlier if you start meeting for dinner."

"No one has said anything about dinner, Ana."

"You could probably change that if you wanted to."

"Things are fine as they are," Ezra insisted, checking his phone again.

"If you say so." He caught Ana suppressing a smile as she pulled into the library parking lot.

Before he could disembark and free himself from her scrutiny, she continued, "I don't make love potions, so don't even bother asking."

"I have absolutely no need or desire for a love potion." It was true that he had never considered obtaining such a product, although he understood why some hypothetical person might require one.

"So we agree that it's up to you to make a move?"

"The only move I'm making is to leave your car." He pushed open the passenger door and unfurled his umbrella as he slid out of his seat.

"I can see I annoyed you. I'm sorry," said Ana when he reached back into the vehicle to grab his bag from the floor.

Ezra's smile conveyed his forgiveness. "Did my aura look red with irritation?"

"I don't need to look at your aura when your emotions are written right across your face." She bent toward him. "As your friend, Ezra, I just want you to be happy. That might be obvious, but I should probably say it anyway because you're so utterly clueless."

"I am not!" 

"And if you want to make a move, then you should, especially if he's any bit as clueless as you are."

As if on cue, a voice called, "Hey, Ezra!"

He turned to find AJ approaching from where the Bentley reigned over its usual corner of asphalt. In the midst of his conversation with Ana, Ezra had not seen AJ careening into the parking lot a few minutes before.

"Can I share your umbrella? I forgot mine," AJ asked upon joining Ezra and Ana.

"Oh, of course." Ezra gave the umbrella an overeager thrust toward his friend, and the tip of one of its ribs bumped against AJ's forehead, sending raindrops ricocheting onto his hair.

"I said _share_ it, not poke my eye out with it," AJ grumbled as he rubbed his forehead. He noticed Ana watching them with amusement. "You must be the carpooling neighbor with the SUV."

"Yes, I'm Ana and this is the SUV. I take it you're AJ." She stretched out her hand to him.

AJ leaned partway inside the car to shake her hand and took advantage of the opportunity to cast a critical glance at the vehicle's interior. "Fabric seats? You should see the leather in my Bentley. I assume Ezra's told you about it."

"Ezra is one of your Bentley's most devoted admirers," Ana assured him.

"I'm not going to stand around in the rain while you brag about your car," Ezra complained to AJ. "My clothes are starting to get wet, and I just had these pants dry-cleaned. Come along." He tugged on AJ's sleeve.

"All right, all right," AJ said. "Maybe your pants wouldn't be getting so wet if you held the umbrella over both of us instead of just me. Here." He stepped closer until their upper arms were touching and wrapped his fingers around the stem of the umbrella, only an inch or so above Ezra's fist. "Is that better?"

"Um, yes. Better." He felt adrift in a sea of sensation and looked to Ana for an anchor. "Have a good day, Ana. I'll see you after work."

Ana gave him a pointed stare. "You two had better hold onto that umbrella. Agnes said it will rain all day." She put the car into gear. "Anyway, it was nice to meet you finally, AJ."

"Good to meet you, too." Once Ana had pulled away, he tilted his head toward Ezra. "Who's Agnes?"

Their faces were so close that Ezra sensed AJ's breath on his cheek. "Nobody, just the person who does the weather," he stammered. "Come on, let's go inside. Did you get my text about lunch?"

When Ezra later checked his phone in the restroom—a habit he had recently acquired; he figured it wasn't as distracting as texting at the desk—he had a new message from Ana. _I was wrong_ , she had written. _That man isn't any bit as clueless as you are. He's EVERY bit as clueless. Good luck._

At lunchtime, still oblivious to the impending chaos, Ezra and AJ relaxed in the break room and ate a slice of cake that a patron had gifted to the library staff.

"This is delicious," said Ezra as he finished taking a bite and passed his fork to AJ, who used it to scoop a large morsel into his own mouth. Neither of them chose to notice the box of spare utensils that sat on the nearby countertop.

AJ was handing the fork back to Ezra when Bee bustled through the doorway. The ceiling lights glinted off the black sequin flies on their white sweater.

"Hello, Bee. How are you?" Ezra asked while deciding which bit of cake he would consume next.

"Stressed, if I'm being honest. There's a hitch in the dance party plans." Bee eyed their coworkers. "Could either of you help me out this afternoon?"

"I'm not sure . . ." Ezra began, but his resolution to avoid the dance party weakened when he saw Bee's disappointment. "What do you need done?"

"Mary was supposed to help with the kids while I picked up the pizza, but I just found out that she went home with a sore throat, so I need someone to take her spot. It would only be for twenty to thirty minutes, just until I get back with the food." Ezra must have still appeared uncertain, because Bee went on: "All you would need to do is greet people and manage a playlist that I'll set up. Deirdre will be there to do the dancing, so you don't have to worry about that."

"What time would you need me?" Ezra hoped that the timing of the party would conflict with his shift at the nonfiction desk.

"We start at three, so if you get to the community room around two-fifty, that would be great." Ezra's heart sank. He was scheduled to finish his desk shift at two and would then have only some small tasks that could easily wait until the next week.

"I . . . guess I could help." He ignored the lift of AJ's eyebrows across the table.

"Thank you _so_ much, Ezra. I really appreciate it." Bee smiled at him as they reached up to adjust one of the butterfly clips securing their dark hair. "I'm just sorry to burden you with this, because I know you weren't involved in the planning, but we're unexpectedly short-staffed in children's today. Hearing that Mary was out sick almost made me fly off the handle, so you saved the day. I'm sure you'll have loads of fun!"

"Hear that? Loads of fun," AJ repeated with a sardonic edge that only Ezra could detect.

Ezra turned to him with an attempt at a disarming smile. "You're available this afternoon, too, aren't you?"

"What? No, I'll be busy in the office." AJ plucked the fork out of Ezra's hand. "Give me that if you're not going to eat any more."

"You told me not ten minutes ago that you didn't know how you would fill the time until the end of your shift."

AJ's eyes narrowed at Ezra over the forkful of cake he was lifting to his mouth.

"We need only one person," Bee interjected, "but if you want to tag along, AJ, then the more the merrier."

"We'll both be there," Ezra told Bee.

AJ kicked him under the table, albeit not hard enough to hurt. Ezra returned the gesture but must have underestimated his strength, because AJ winced in pain and scowled. "Sorry," Ezra mouthed, pushing the plate of cake across the table. "You can have the rest." AJ dug into the remains of the cake with a cheerfulness that made Ezra question how injured he had really been.

Bee's puzzlement over these proceedings did not dampen their relief at finding not one but two replacements for Mary. "I'm so grateful to both of you. I'll see you at the community room a bit before three." The sequin flies winked at Ezra as Bee grabbed their lunch from the staff fridge and left to eat at their desk.

Once they were gone, Ezra looked in consternation at AJ, who was calmly scraping the last smears of frosting off the plate. "AJ, what on earth are we going to do with these children?"

"You're the one who signed us up for this. I'll let you handle it."

"No, I need your help! I haven't the faintest idea of how to entertain a crowd of children." He grabbed the plate from AJ. "I'm getting another slice of cake."

"Bee said you just need to play music for them. That should be easy enough," AJ said while he watched Ezra saw off a chunk of cake that could have fed multiple ravenous children.

"Yes, but what if they expect something more? Children are used to very high-quality entertainment these days. They might start . . . jeering at us if they don't like what we're doing."

"Well, if that happens, then we'll jeer right back at them. I'm sure we can think of better insults than they can."

Ezra returned to his seat. "We can't do that. The parents will report us for bullying, and we'll be blacklisted for future library jobs." AJ reached the fork toward the new slice of cake, but Ezra snatched it from his grasp and snapped, "This slice is for me. Get your own."

AJ crossed his arms and reclined in his chair. "What sort of high-quality entertainment do you suggest we provide?"

"I don't know. That's the problem." Ezra chewed pensively. "We could try magic tricks."

"Ezra, it's the twenty-first century. Plain magic tricks are not going to impress these brats. Besides, who's going to do the tricks? You?"

Ezra bristled at AJ's skepticism. "Why not me?"

"You're far too honest to pull off deception, even for fun."

"I can be deceptive if I want to."

"Name one instance in which you have successfully deceived me."

Ezra racked his brains as he kept digging into his cake, but the only example that came to mind was how he concealed the nagging desire to kiss AJ on the mouth. He certainly couldn't mention that, especially since he himself had lately begun to doubt the success of this subterfuge. "I can't tell you, because you'll just say I didn't actually deceive you, and you're too _good_ at deception for me to figure out if you're telling the truth."

AJ grinned. "That sounds about right."

"Then why don't _you_ do the magic tricks?"

"Forget magic. We'll just stick to what Bee instructed us to do. It'll be fine. Relax." 

Ezra took a deep breath. He was halfway through his slice of cake and quickly losing stamina, so he pushed the plate and fork toward AJ. "Help me finish this, please."

"See, you can't fool me," said AJ as he picked up the fork once more. "I knew you'd offer me some in the end."

"Stop acting smug and eat your cake."

When Ezra and AJ met Bee in the community room, several small children, most around three or four years of age, had already arrived with their caregivers. "I'm going to head out now," Bee said after some last-minute equipment checks. "All you need to do is keep the music going and make sure no one misbehaves too badly. I'll be back soon."

"We'll handle it," AJ promised. Ezra wished he were half as confident. He had already seen at least one child look at his bowtie with what he could only describe as a sneer.

He and AJ waded through an ever-growing crowd of children to a table at the side of the room. One little boy followed them and strained a grimy set of fingers toward an open laptop that stood on the table.

"Please don't do that," Ezra requested. When the boy refused to acknowledge his existence, AJ took more decisive action by whisking the computer out of the child's reach and saying, "None of that for you, kid." Ezra worried the boy would throw an unsightly tantrum and ruin AJ's career with an accusation of bullying, but the child ran off without a word, already forgetting the laptop.

By the time Ezra had settled himself into a seat behind the table, the number of children attending the event had doubled, if not tripled. The room echoed with the sounds of babbling, high-pitched laughter, and, alarmingly, crying.

"At least they're young and fairly forgiving," Ezra said to AJ, raising his voice to be heard over the din. "It would be worse if they were eleven or twelve." He shivered at the idea of entertaining judgmental preteens.

"Kids at those ages would eat you alive if tried your magic tricks on them," AJ agreed from where he leaned against the wall near Ezra's chair. "What sort of magic were you thinking of doing anyway?"

"Pulling coins out of ears, that sort of thing. You're right that it wouldn't hold their interest," Ezra admitted gloomily. "Besides, I don't know if I want to get close to their ears. They might not be clean."

"I have spotless ears, if you ever feel the need to practice."

The official start of the party prevented Ezra from responding. Deirdre Young, one of the children's librarians, stepped to the front of the room and announced that the music and dancing would now begin, eliciting a cacophony of cheers from the children and muted applause from the adults.

"I think that's our signal to start," said Ezra. The laptop was already open to Bee's Spotify playlist, which featured a cover image of a jiving spider. Ezra hit the play button, and gentle music floated through the speakers mounted to the walls. The song was about fish and rabbits waking up and going to sleep, and Deidre led the children in a dance that mimicked the movements of the animals.

Ezra found it all rather endearing, but AJ was not impressed. He squatted next to Ezra and squinted at the laptop screen. "What the fuck is this?"

"AJ, don't swear! We're at a family event."

"I at least thought we were going to listen to actual music. This is like the hold music you'd get if you called the DMV in hell."

"It's not _that_ bad."

"Your taste leaves much to be desired." AJ pulled the laptop toward him, and, within a couple of minutes, he had navigated to a "Best of Queen" playlist. "Want to help me pick out a song?"

"This isn't what Bee had planned," Ezra protested, but he leaned forward to get a closer view of the screen. After a second of hesitation, he dared to brace a hand on his friend's shoulder. AJ's eyes snapped downward toward Ezra's fingers, and the cursor on the laptop zigzagged wildly across the screen before returning to hover over the list of songs.

"There's an option," said AJ, positioning the cursor next to one song.

"AJ, 'Fat Bottomed Girls' is not appropriate for these children."

"Oh, come on, they'll just think it's funny. They probably listen to much more inappropriate music at home."

"You have to pick something else."

"Fine, we'll do this one." AJ put "We Will Rock You" in the queue and sat back on his heels. Ezra let go of AJ's shoulder, and AJ absentmindedly raised his own hand to rub the vacant spot.

The sleeping animal tune was almost over, and soon the soft sounds of piano and acoustic guitar were replaced by the pounding rhythm of the Queen song. Deirdre stared in confusion at AJ, who shrugged and called to her, "It was on the playlist!"

The children were delighted by the unexpected change in programming. Once they grew acclimated to the song, most of them began stomping on the floor and clapping their hands in time with the beat, and some of them crowed, "We will, we will rock you" along with the band. Deirdre was left with no choice but to follow the children's lead.

The corners of AJ's mouth twisted upward as he watched the commotion he had created. "What should we play next?" he asked Ezra, unable to keep the eagerness out of his voice. "'Bohemian Rhapsody,' maybe?"

"No, that one talks about killing a man, and that's—"

"Right, right, inappropriate for children. Here, 'We Are the Champions' is safe enough."

After the guitars at the end of "We Will Rock You" almost sent the children into a frenzy, the slow beginning of "We Are the Champions" gave them time to settle down before the song reached a crescendo and launched them into another flurry of movement. Deirdre again frowned over the heads of the twisting, flailing, and air-guitaring children, and AJ yelled back, hands outstretched apologetically, "Also on the playlist!"

AJ next selected "Another One Bites the Dust," despite Ezra's concerns about violent lyrics. By the time that song ended and was replaced by "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," AJ himself was tapping his toe and moving his shoulders in a way that Ezra found thoroughly arresting.

AJ caught Ezra's eye. "What are you doing, just sitting there? Don't you dance?"

Ezra folded his hands in his lap. "I am fulfilling my responsibilities as a chaperone."

"Chaperone? That's what their parents are here for."

"They might be very precocious children," said Ezra, watching as one little boy shook his mop of hair like a wet dog, while the girl next to him picked her nose. "I have to make sure none of them sneak out of the room and start fooling around in the library."

"Ezra, do you really think the _kids_ are the ones most likely to sneak out and fool around?"

Ezra could not argue with this reasoning, so he rose from his seat. "All right, but don't expect me to do . . . whatever it is you're doing." His eyes felt weighted with stones as he lifted them from AJ's hips.

Any worries Ezra may have had about sneering children quickly subsided, since the young patrons were far too immersed in their own uninhibited dancing to criticize Ezra's more restrained shuffling and swaying. While Ezra danced in place, AJ grew increasingly energetic beside him, sliding from one foot to the other and mouthing the lyrics. His movements made his sunglasses slip down from the top of his head, so he took them off and twirled them in his fingers.

The children's energy continued unabated through "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" and into AJ's next pick, "Don't Stop Me Now." Once the tempo of the song gathered speed, the children began turning somersaults, attempting cartwheels, and leaping off chairs. Deidre had joined hands with a ring of small dancers, and even some of the parents participated in the fun, shimmying with their kids or taking videos on their phones. Ezra felt a twinge of concern about family-friendliness when Freddie Mercury sang, "I am a sex machine, ready to reload," but censorship duties retreated to the back of his mind when he registered how AJ lip-synced those lyrics and—coincidentally, of course—flashed a grin in Ezra's direction.

As the song wound to a close, a girl rushed up to the table and demanded, "Play the 'Rock You' song again!"

"You got it!" AJ told her and put "We Will Rock You" into the queue. When the song began, the children pounded their feet to the rhythm with an intensity that threatened to shake the whole building. Several young voices howled "More!" at the end of the short song, and AJ started it from the beginning.

Although Ezra fully expected to have a headache by the end of the day, he stamped and clapped with as much gusto as he could muster. Far from mocking him, some of the children beamed at him, and he smiled back. AJ, meanwhile, looked as if he were two seconds away from climbing onto the table and performing his best impression of Freddie Mercury.

At the end of the song, a few children collapsed onto the floor in a show of exhaustion, and Ezra and AJ pulled in deep breaths as they turned to each other. Still caught up in the high of the music, they forgot to pick a new song, so the next tune in the playlist began on its own: "You're My Best Friend."

"Ooh, you make me live," the speakers declared as AJ took two steps toward Ezra, putting only about a foot of space between them. "You're a bit crooked," he tried to say over the music.

"What's that?" Ezra asked, suddenly disoriented.

"Your tie is crooked!" AJ repeated in a louder voice and reached both hands toward Ezra's bowtie. Straightening it couldn't have taken more than a moment, but AJ's hands kept hold of the fabric as his eyes flicked back up to meet Ezra's gaze.

"My feelings are true, I really love you," Freddie crooned in the background.

At that moment, Ezra wished that the children really did despise him. Perhaps then they would give him a violent shove in the back and force him to bridge the distance that his leaden feet couldn't cross on their own.

Instead of pushing him into AJ's arms, however, the kids were screaming, "Pizza!"

"What's all this?" asked Bee from the other side of the table, where they stood holding three sheet pizzas.

AJ and Ezra stepped hurriedly away from each other. Misinterpreting Bee's question, Ezra spluttered, "My bowtie was crooked, so AJ was just—"

"I don't think I put any Queen on the playlist," Bee continued with a perplexed twist in their mouth.

"No, it's been a very _interesting_ party," said Deidre, who had joined them at the table with an armload of paper plates. "But fun," she conceded with a nod at Ezra and AJ, temporarily excusing their rogue DJing.

"It was awesome!" agreed a child, though he seemed more concerned with grabbing the first slice of pizza than with providing honest commentary.

"Well, that's music to my ears," said Bee with a smile. "Thanks again, you two. We'll take it from here, so you can head out, but feel free to have some pizza."

Ezra and AJ turned down the offer of pizza, which the kids were currently ripping apart with distressing ferocity, and walked side by side toward the community room doors. Ezra felt like a conquering hero who had survived the perils of child-friendly entertainment, unscathed by jeers and rewarded with the memory of AJ's hands near his face.

"I'd say that was a success," he said once the doors had closed behind them. The last strains of "You're My Best Friend" followed them into the hushed atrium. "What do you think?"

AJ stuck his hands in his pockets and drew in another lungful of air, leading Ezra to believe that he must have been dancing awfully hard to be so out of breath. In trying to frame this idea into a joke, Ezra almost didn't catch what AJ asked next: "Do you want to go get a drink?"

"Wh—"

"After work, I mean. I know you won't go anywhere before your shift is actually done, but's when work's over, so, five o'clock, maybe? Just one drink between friends. I'd say we both deserve it after all this. And I'll give you a ride, unless—"

Ezra didn't wait to hear the rest of the sentence. "I'd be delighted."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is inspired by one of my favorite bars, and now I have been stricken by nostalgia for pre-pandemic days.

The Nightingale was the only bar in town that resembled a British pub. A pub connoisseur might quibble about its authenticity, but the dark wood paneling, the muted lighting, and the menu full of things like ale and Scotch eggs provided enough verisimilitude to make Ezra feel like a character in a British novel, which was all the authenticity he needed. Light music filtered through the buzz of merry voices and clinking dishes.

"See, this is why I like it here. You can hear yourself think. It's not one of those places where you have to sit on top of each other to have a conversation," Ezra said as he and AJ passed an assortment of tables on their way to the bar. Some of the tables were in cozy-looking alcoves, one of which featured a faux fireplace, but Ezra hesitated to propose sitting in such an intimate spot. After all, AJ had termed this outing "a drink between friends," and friends did not usually share their drinks in spaces designed for semi-public canoodling.

Instead, they slid into a pair of platonically distanced stools at the bar, and Ezra asked the bartender for one of the clipboards that listed the pub's beverage offerings. The well-thumbed pages on the board curled up at the edges, so Ezra and AJ each held down a side of the menu as they examined it between them.

Ezra was still weighing his options when AJ abandoned the drink list and braced his elbow against the bar, resting his cheek on his fist. His gaze bored into Ezra like a corkscrew as he asked, "Out of curiosity, where might I find those other places?"

Ezra looked up from the menu. "What other places?"

"Like you just said, the places where you have to sit on top of each other."

"That was obviously an exaggeration, AJ. I just meant that other bars can be unnecessarily loud."

"And here I was thinking I had a chance to spice up my nightlife."

"Well, you can count me out." Ezra returned to his perusal of the clipboard.

"I never said anything about inviting you."

"It seemed a reasonable assumption."

"I guess you're right." One side of AJ's mouth twisted upward. "Would you be the person who sits, or the one who is sat upon? I could go either way myself."

"I will be the one who stands up and leaves if you don't give me a minute of peace to pick a drink," said Ezra, poring more closely over the menu in an attempt to hide his reddened face.

"Do you need help making up your mind?" AJ removed his elbow from the bar and leaned toward Ezra. "What's caught your eye?"

"No, no, I'm almost ready," Ezra protested, even as he reread the same cocktail description for the fourth time and still retained none of the information. "What are you getting?"

"Just a cider. I have to chauffeur you around, so no heavy drinking for me."

"Good lord, I forgot about that."

"What?"

"I'll have to get in a car with you after you've consumed alcohol. Your driving is bad enough when you're sober."

"Bad?" The word was charged with AJ's indignation. "My driving is not _bad_ , just . . . purposeful. I get where I'm going without wasting any time."

"Observing the speed limit is not a waste of time."

"That's debatable. Besides, I don't think I sped at all on the way here."

"Probably because you were too busy making fun of my dancing."

"All I said was that you had a big smile stuck on your face while you were dancing. You looked like a kid on Christmas."

"By which you meant I looked ridiculous." Embarrassed, Ezra returned his attention to the drink list.

"That's not what I meant at all. You're not ridiculous to me, Ezra." When Ezra continued to blink unseeingly at the clipboard, AJ tapped the toe of his shoe against Ezra's calf. "Did you hear me?"

Ezra kept his eyes trained downward, wary of the emotions that would stand exposed in them if he met AJ's gaze. "Yes, I heard." After a moment, he darted a smile at his companion. "Go ahead and get your drink. I'll be ready soon."

"Finally. I thought you'd have me wait until next century," AJ replied, retreating from sincerity to the more familiar territory of sarcasm. He hailed the bartender and ordered his cider.

Ezra located AJ's choice on the menu. "That actually sounds decent. I'll have the same," he told the bartender.

"You got it," the man drawled. "Are you guys staying for trivia?"

"Trivia?" Ezra asked.

"Yeah, starts at 6:30, every Friday. Five dollars a team."

"Sure, we'll play," said AJ, reaching for his wallet. "We might do all right if we put our heads together," he addressed Ezra, who nodded in agreement.

"Well, you're not gonna win, I can tell you that much," the bartender said as he bent to retrieve two bottles of cider from underneath the bar.

"That remains to be seen," Ezra shot back. "We're both very well read."

"You could read a whole library, and you still wouldn't beat Mort over there." The bartender jutted his chin toward a table tucked in the far corner of the pub. Looking over his shoulder, Ezra beheld a cadaverous man hunched alone at the table, drumming his long, bony fingers against the side of his beer bottle.

"The guy's a genius," whispered the bartender in awe, even though Mort didn't appear to be within earshot. "He's won every trivia game since I've worked here."

"That doesn't seem fair," Ezra objected.

"Take it up with him if you've got a problem." While the bartender added AJ's five dollars to an envelope by the cash register, Ezra peered again at the shadowy table in the corner and watched as Mort's sunken eyes idly scanned the pub. Their gazes met for a moment, and Ezra turned hastily back to the bar, feeling a slight chill. He wished he could sidle closer to AJ, but the barstools were secured to the floor, so he took refuge in his drink.

"Cheers," said AJ, raising his bottle toward Ezra's. The ciders met with a pleasing clink that revived Ezra's spirits.

"I still don't think it's fair for that man to win every trivia game," he insisted to AJ after they had set their bottles back on their coasters.

"Don't worry. We'll give him a run for his money." AJ cast a glance toward Mort. "At least he has good taste in clothes."

"They're all black."

"What did you think I meant?"

Ezra suppressed a laugh. "They'd look better on him if he didn't have a face like a skull."

"Insulting the competition?" AJ feigned surprise. "I thought you were too polite for that."

"He can't hear me."

"What nasty things do you say about _my_ black clothes behind my back?"

"Nothing! Your clothes look fine." Ezra scanned AJ's attire out of the corner of his eye and saw nothing to contradict his statement.

"Really?" AJ sounded incredulous. "I was hoping you'd have something just a little nasty to say."

"Well . . . sometimes your pants are a bit tighter than they need to be."

AJ treated him to a devilish grin. "I thought the point was to mention something you _don't_ like," he said, pivoting slightly in his seat and hooking his ankle around the foot rail at the bottom of Ezra's barstool.

The bartender chose this moment to return to their place at the bar and hand them two sheets of copy paper and a stubby pencil. "Keep the sheets stacked together, you see, so when you write on one it'll show up on the other. You can give one to me at the end."

Ezra thanked him and set the paper next to his cider, careful to keep it clear of any wet spots on the bar. "Do you mind if I do the writing?" he asked AJ, who still had his foot on Ezra's stool.

"Not at all. Your handwriting's better than mine."

"This isn't the first time that you've complimented my penmanship. Yours must be dreadful," Ezra said as he inscribed "Ezra and AJ" in cursive at the top of the paper.

"Here, give me the pencil." As soon as Ezra was done with his header, AJ reached for the writing materials and jotted "We Will Rock You" below their names. "What do you think?"

"It's legible, but not very elegant."

"Elegance is your department." AJ pushed the paper and pencil back to Ezra and took another sip of cider. "You haven't played trivia here before?"

"No, I've never happened to come here at the right day and time. Are you any good at trivia?"

"Depends on the topic. Maybe all of the questions will be about classic cars."

"God, I hope not," said Ezra. "I hear enough about your car as it is."

To AJ's chagrin, and Ezra's relief, none of the questions involved automobiles. When 6:30 arrived, the bartender turned on a microphone and announced the start of the game: "All right, phones away if you're playing. Try to keep things quiet so people can hear. We'll have fifteen questions tonight, and they're all about the Bible."

"Oh dear," Ezra whispered. "Do you know much about the Bible?"

AJ shrugged. "I have a passing acquaintance with the thing."

"Me, too. We'll do what we can." Ezra held the pencil poised over the paper.

The first question instilled more confidence in them. "What kind of animal did Satan become in the Garden of Eden?" the bartender read from a document on his phone.

"Well, that's fucking obvious," AJ murmured. "It's a snake."

"If anyone would know the answer to that, it would be you."

The next few answers were similarly straightforward, although Ezra and AJ had to deliberate over the seventh question: "Who were the four horsemen of the apocalypse?"

"There's death, right?" Ezra consulted AJ. "And then war, because there's supposed to be a lot of violence during the apocalypse."

"Death, war . . . and maybe hunger? No, famine, that's it. As if death and war weren't enough, we have to make people starve as well."

The discussion of famine awakened Ezra's stomach, and he remembered that he had not eaten anything since sharing cake with AJ at lunch. "Do you want to order some food after the game?"

"All right, fine by me," AJ agreed with a smile.

"Unless you need to leave to do other things. I understand if you're busy."

"Don't get sidetracked." AJ dismissed Ezra's courtesy with a wave of his half-empty cider bottle. "Who's the fourth horseman?"

"Oh, I don't know. . . I think it's something like pollution."

"It can't be that. Pollution wasn't as big a deal back in Bible times."

"True, but I'm certain it's a word that starts with a _p_."

"Plagues? Parasites? Pandemics?" AJ suggested while he watched Ezra mouth potential answers.

"Pestilence! That's the one. Thank you for jogging my memory."

By the time Ezra had recorded the names of the four horsemen, the bartender had already posed the next question: "Which angel told Mary that she would give birth to Jesus?" Ezra managed to convince AJ that the answer was the Archangel Gabriel.

"Kind of a dick move on Gabriel's part, don't you think?" mused AJ. "Dropping out of the sky to tell Mary about a pregnancy she didn't ask for, and then barely giving any practical advice."

"I'm sure Gabriel was doing his best," said Ezra, putting down the pencil to take another drink. Bottle in hand, he contemplated their progress in the game. "Why do you think they need war, famine, and pestilence as horsemen when they already have death? Doesn't death encompass the other three?"

"It's the Bible, Ezra. God doesn't seem to lose any sleep over sending people to hell, so I doubt he gives a shit about redundancy."

"That sounds blasphemous."

"Too bad. I'll mail you a postcard when I get to hell."

They did not encounter further difficulties until the final question. "Once Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden, an angel guarded the entrance so they couldn't get back in," the bartender bellowed into his microphone. "What was the angel holding?"

Ezra opened his mouth to supply the answer but suddenly realized that he was at a loss. "AJ, I don't know. I thought I had it, but now it's slipped my mind. . . . Could it be a cross?"

"No, this is Old Testament stuff. They hadn't gotten around to crucifying people yet."

"They did like foreshadowing in the Old Testament, though, so it might still be correct. Do you have any ideas?"

"Another snake? Adam and Eve were probably scared of snakes after their first run-in with one."

"The angel wouldn't stand around holding a snake. That would be like consorting with the enemy."

"Maybe the angel liked the snake. I'll bet it was more interesting than whatever holy bullshit was going on up in heaven."

Ezra frowned. "That seems unlikely. . . . Why does the angel even need to hold something? Couldn't they just use their own powers to keep Adam and Eve out?"

In the end, with AJ's grudging approval, Ezra wrote, "Trick question—the angel wasn't holding anything."

The bartender gave the participants several minutes to revise their responses and then directed everyone to submit the top sheet of their copy paper. Ezra slid the piece of paper across the bar and examined the sheet beneath, which presented a facsimile of their penciled answers. Regrettably, his handwriting had declined in neatness over the course of game. In comparison with the final answer, the names at the top of the page looked as if they might have been written by a different person, or at least by someone who had not downed a bottle of hard cider on an empty stomach.

"Ok, everyone, time for the answers. Keep track of how many you got right," the bartender called out over his mic. "Number one—what animal did Satan become in the Garden of Eden—is a snake." A few bar patrons let out little exclamations of relief at having guessed correctly, and the bartender continued down the list of questions.

At last, only one answer remained to be revealed, and Ezra and AJ had still not made any mistakes. Emboldened by excitement, Ezra gripped AJ's wrist and whispered, "We might win!"

AJ closed his other hand over Ezra's intrepid fingers. "Yeah, there's a chance." His palm felt somewhat cold and clammy from holding his cider bottle, but Ezra didn't care. AJ could have had rattlesnakes for fingers, and Ezra would gladly have risked venom poisoning to feel them coiled around his skin.

"We still don't know how that other guy did, though," AJ added.

Ezra's eyes veered guiltily away from the dark hairs on AJ's wrists. "What other guy?"

"The one who always wins, like the bartender said."

Ezra glanced again toward the table in the corner. Mort leaned back in his chair, staring impassively at the sheet of trivia answers that lay next to his beer.

"He doesn't look nervous at all," Ezra observed. "He doesn't even look interested."

"Nervous?" AJ's low tone snapped Ezra's attention back to the bar. "Why do you say that? Are _you_ nervous about something, Ezra?" Heat had replaced the clamminess of AJ's palm, and his thumb traced one long, slow arc over the back of Ezra's hand.

Ezra swallowed. "I—"

The bartender interrupted with the solution to the final piece of trivia. "So, for question fifteen, the angel who guarded Eden was holding a flaming sword. Got that? Flaming sword."

Ezra caught the answer only once the bartender had repeated it. "Oh no, we were wrong about that one," he groaned. "I ought to have known about the sword."

"You must have been distracted," AJ said with a barely perceptible smirk.

The bartender kept going: "All right, let's see how you folks did. Did anyone get all fifteen out of fifteen?"

"I did," Mort announced in a sepulchral tone. He unfolded himself from his chair and shuffled to the end of the bar, his bulky black shoes treading heavily on the hardwood floor.

"Well, no surprise there," remarked the bartender. He located the answer sheet that Mort had submitted earlier and gave it a cursory check before returning to his mic. "That's it, folks. We have a winner. See you guys next week," he told the trivia players, not even bothering to congratulate Mort on his latest victory.

Applause was sparse, and Ezra turned back to AJ as Mort stalked past with his prize, a voucher for five free drinks. "Don't you wish we had won instead of him?"

"Forget about flaming swords and all that. Let's order some dinner." AJ gave Ezra's hand a parting squeeze and released it.

Fortified by a plate of fish and chips, as well as an additional cider, Ezra held the umbrella for AJ on their walk to the Bentley. AJ wrapped his fingers around Ezra's elbow to steady the umbrella between them.

"Should we come back here next week?" Ezra asked once they had pulled out of the tiny parking lot behind the Nightingale. AJ kept the volume of the music low, but, over the bassline rhythm of the windshield wipers, Ezra could make out Freddie Mercury's voice proclaiming that he wanted it all and wanted it now.

"Sure, I'd like that," AJ replied. Streetlights flickered past as the Bentley gathered speed. "I take it you had a good time today?"

"Yes, I did." Ezra tried to cram as much warmth as possible into the monosyllables. Too tired to give accurate directions, he input his home address into the GPS on his phone, and a robotic voice commanded them to make a right in a quarter mile. The GPS estimated that they would arrive at Ezra's apartment in eleven minutes, but with AJ's driving, Ezra guessed that he would be on his doorstep in eight.

"You don't have to give me a ride home next week, though," he added. "Not if it's an inconvenience."

"Shut up about that. If I want to play chauffeur, then I will."

"Oh, of course," Ezra said drily, not fooled by AJ's brusqueness. "How could I forget that your life principle is doing what you want, when you want?"

"Don't knock it until you try it."

Perhaps it was the long day, or the alcohol, or the effort to ignore the dwindling minutes of the trip, but Ezra found himself rambling. "I don't know. Wanting things can feel very . . . unstable. When you want to do something different, you can't do it without having to change other things, and how do you know you actually want those changes in the long term? Maybe you just want the thing itself without the consequences, but you can't have the thing without the consequences, so maybe you just don't want it at all."

AJ remained quiet for a moment. "I'm not sure I caught all of that, but I got enough to guess that you might be overthinking."

"Maybe." Ezra rubbed his heavy eyelids, while the GPS instructed them to make a left in five hundred feet. "Like with this song," he continued after a minute of thought. "He talks about wanting it all now, but that seems too fast. Has he stopped to consider if it'll all be worthwhile?"

"Unfortunately, Freddie Mercury's dead, so it's a bit late to ask him, much as I wish we could." A car horn honked at the Bentley as AJ wove through the lanes of traffic. "Fuck off, I know what I'm doing!" he yelled at the other driver. "Anyway," he continued, his tone softening, "take your time, Ezra."

"What?" Ezra was still trying to determine how they were not lying dead on the roadside after AJ's most recent maneuvers.

"I said take your time making up your mind. I'll still want to give you a ride home next week, and I'll be fine with whatever the consequences are, even if there aren't any consequences at all."

"Oh, well, thank you." Tension lifted from Ezra's shoulders. "I appreciate that, AJ."

He expected a sardonic response, but the words that emerged from AJ's mouth were "You're welcome."

"Keep right," the GPS interjected into the ensuing silence. According to Ezra's phone, only three minutes of driving remained.

"What do you think the chances are that Bee will let us help with their next dance party?" AJ asked.

Ezra gratefully accepted the change in topic. "They'll never ask us again. We didn't follow their instructions at all."

"And it's a good thing we didn't. You can't go wrong with Queen. Even the parents had fun."

"I think you scandalized those children with your dancing."

"If I scandalized anyone at that party, it was you."

"Me? You have no power to scandalize me, AJ."

"Agree to disagree. Regardless, I highly doubt anyone was paying as much attention to my dancing as you were."

"Don't flatter yourself," Ezra teased.

As he had anticipated, they reached his apartment complex in record time. Ezra clutched his work bag to his chest and gripped the handle of his umbrella, shielding himself with the familiar objects as he prepared to say goodbye to AJ.

"I'll tell you this," AJ spoke up. Rain coursed down the windshield, and the lights around the parking lot cast the shadows of the rivulets onto AJ's face. "If it's me. . . I mean, if spending time with me is what you want, then I can't guarantee it'll be worthwhile, but I'll do my best to make it that way."

"All right," Ezra said, his voice barely audible over the sound of rain pattering on the roof of the parked car. 

"I don't have any doubts about whether it would be worthwhile for me."

A worry flashed through Ezra's mind, and he rushed to clarify, "I haven't regretted any of the time I've spent with you, AJ. I didn't mean to imply that."

"That's good to hear."

Ezra suspected that friends did not normally conclude their platonic drink outings by staring at each other with the level of intensity that currently pulsed through the Bentley.

"I should go inside," he stammered, opening the passenger side door. "It's already dark, and I have to draw up a grocery list for tomorrow."

"Well, I wouldn't dare to keep you from that. Lunch on Monday?"

"I believe my schedule will permit it." They exchanged a smile, and Ezra dragged himself out into the puddle-ridden parking lot.

"Sweet dreams, Ezra," AJ called before the car door swung shut.


	10. Chapter 10

On the following Friday morning, Ezra waited until the last possible moment to tell Ana that he would not be carpooling home with her. Only when she had parked her SUV outside the library and wished him a good workday did he dare to broach the subject.

"By the way," he said, busily straightening the strap of his messenger bag, "I already have a ride tonight, so you won't need to pick me up."

Despite this valiant attempt at nonchalance, Ana immediately guessed what was afoot. "You must have another date!" she exclaimed with all of the curiosity that he had dreaded.

"I've _told_ you, Ana. We didn't go on a date last week, and we're not going on one tonight."

"But I'm correct in assuming that your ride tonight is with AJ, right?"

"Yes, but it's not a date."

"If you say so. . . . Are you going to the pub again?"

"That's our plan at the moment." Eager to end the conversation, Ezra reached to open the car door, but he suddenly pulled his arm back up to his face to smother a violent sneeze.

"Bless you! Well, I hope you and AJ have a fun time," Ana said while he blew his nose.

"Thanks," Ezra tried to reply, but his nasal congestion distorted the word into something that was not listed in any English dictionary.

Ana frowned. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yes, just some sniffles," he assured her, omitting any mention of the sore throat that had plagued him for the past hour. "I've never felt better."

By lunchtime, Ezra had changed his mind and decided that there had been several periods in his life when he had felt better. In fact, he struggled to recall any recent occasions on which he had felt worse.

The balcony was closed due to windy weather, so he and AJ agreed to have lunch indoors. When Ezra entered the break room, blowing his nose for what felt like the thousandth time, he found AJ slumped over a table, using his arm as a pillow between his cheek and the tabletop. A plate of microwaved Chinese leftovers sat before him, but he was doing little more than glumly nudging the grains of fried rice with his fork.

"I feel like shit," he croaked.

"I'm a touch under the weather myself," said Ezra as he collapsed into the seat opposite his friend's.

AJ raised his head and narrowed his eyes at Ezra. "You have it, too? You bastard, you must have given me your germs." He sniffed loudly. "Do you have a spare tissue, by any chance?"

"There's an entire box of Kleenex on the counter over there."

AJ eyed the five feet of flooring that lay between the table and the counter. "That's too far to walk."

"Fine, I'll get it for you," Ezra sighed, heaving himself to his feet. "You have no way of knowing if the germs came from me," he pointed out once he had sunk back into his seat. "They could just as easily have come from you. It stands to reason, given how often you insist on sharing my utensils."

"I'm dying, Ezra," AJ groaned as he lifted a handful of tissues to his nose. "Don't begrudge me a few utensils."

"Good grief, AJ, you're not dying. You just have a cold."

AJ mumbled something unintelligible into his Kleenex, while Ezra contemplated the salad that he had brought for lunch. He quivered with a chill and wished that he had packed a warm meal instead.

"Could I have some of your rice?" he asked AJ.

"No, that's how you infected me in the first place," AJ snapped, even as he used his fork to push a mound of rice to the side of the plate nearest Ezra. "You can have that bit, though." He laid his head back down on his arm and watched Ezra pick at his food.

"I take it you don't feel well enough to go to the Nightingale later," Ezra remarked after a while, not wanting to admit his own unreadiness for a night out. Even the prospect of AJ's companionship at the pub could not deter him from craving a cup of chamomile tea and an early bedtime.

"I wouldn't say that." AJ hauled himself up in his chair. "I'll be fine in a few hours."

"I thought you were dying."

"We're all dying, Ezra. Let's have some fun while we still can." He broke into a fit of sneezing that was probably audible to patrons on the opposite end of the building.

"Well, we shouldn't make any fixed plans yet," said Ezra, dabbing at his own nose with a tissue. "See how you feel at the end of the day."

Things had not improved by the end of the day.

"My nose feels like a goddamn faucet," AJ complained as he and Ezra lugged themselves into the Bentley.

"We really should have left work early," lamented Ezra, shivering in spite of the warm spring afternoon. Coworkers and patrons alike had looked askance at him while he sniffled through the last hours of his shift. "Do you still want to go get a drink?"

"Do you?"

Ezra opened his mouth to say yes but couldn't find the energy to lie. "No, I'm sorry, I honestly don't. All I'd like to do is go home and make myself some soup and go to sleep."

"God, I'm glad you said it." AJ turned the key in the ignition. "I'll drop you off at home and we'll wait until next week for drinks."

"That sounds very nice."

"Now, let's just hope I can keep my eyes open long enough to get to your place."

Alarm shot through Ezra at this statement, but his own eyes drooped shut for most of the ride, so he missed the dubious excitement of witnessing any particularly close brushes with death. AJ must have managed to keep at least one eye open, because Ezra heard no car horns blaring with outrage at the Bentley. A series of obscure Queen songs, accompanied by sneezes and coughs, constituted the only soundtrack to the trip.

"How do you feel?" Ezra inquired once they were parked outside his apartment building.

"Like Satan himself just fucked me in the sinuses." AJ cracked a grin at Ezra's dismayed expression.

"Why don't you come in and have some soup?" Ezra offered, partly out of genuine concern, but mostly out of reluctance to say goodbye. After all, he had been anticipating their visit to the Nightingale all week, and he wasn't going to let their duplicitous immune systems completely derail the evening. "You shouldn't be driving when you're so sick. Soup might make you feel better."

AJ unbuckled his seatbelt. "You don't need to ask me twice."

Ushering AJ inside his home should have been an important occasion, but the event lost all solemnity when AJ's first words upon crossing the threshold were "Your nose looks as red as a tomato."

They left their shoes in the entrance hall and washed their hands in the kitchen before convening around a box of Kleenex in the living room. AJ's eyes darted from the crowded bookshelves lining the walls, to the stacks of books leaning against the couch, to the coffee table strewn with books that had other volumes stuck inside them as bookmarks.

"How many of these have you actually read?" he questioned.

Ezra was in no mood to discuss the distressingly large number of books in his collection that remained unread. "A good number of them," he called as he made his way back to the kitchen and pulled two cans of chicken noodle soup from his tiny pantry.

AJ followed him into the kitchen, his black socks padding over the linoleum, and commandeered the cans from Ezra's grasp. "I'll take care of the soup. Just tell me where to find a pot."

"You're my guest, AJ. I'll make our dinner."

"You're in no condition to operate a stove. I'm afraid you'll fall asleep and burn down the place."

"I could easily say the same about you," Ezra argued, but AJ's face assumed such a threatening cast that he capitulated. "Pots are to the left of the oven."

"Thanks. Now go change into whatever you wear to relax. I don't trust anyone who voluntarily wears a bowtie when they're sick."

"You can't be all that unwell if you're still able to make fun of my bowties."

AJ pried the lids from the soup cans with more arm-flexing than was strictly necessary. "I could be lying in my fucking coffin, and I'd still come back from the dead to tease you about your bowties."

"You're making it very difficult to be hospitable," Ezra said, but sternness was impossible when congestion gave his voice the tenor of a badly feigned Cockney accent.

When he returned to the kitchen, the soup was warming in a pot on the stovetop, and AJ sagged against the counter, a glass of water in his hand. "I don't know if I've ever seen you drink water before," Ezra observed.

"Desperate times, desperate measures. You know how it goes." AJ nodded toward another water glass on the counter. "That one's for you." His eyes traveled the length of Ezra's body. "Am I delirious, or did you just put on different work clothes?"

"These aren't my work clothes, AJ. See? No bowtie." Ezra gestured with his glass toward the unadorned collar of his white shirt.

"Oh, don't worry, I noticed. You're still wearing a collared shirt, though."

"But it's not one I'd wear to work. There's an ink stain on the cuff from when one of my pens broke." Ezra held out his wrist to show a blue dot scarcely larger than a pinhead.

"I'm shocked that you would wear such an unsightly garment while you're entertaining a guest," AJ joked. "By the way," he continued as Ezra stirred the soup, "while we're on the topic of clothing, I found some very interesting things in your kitchen."

Ezra turned from the stove, a frown creasing his brow. "Like what?"

An attack of sneezing overcame both of them, and Ezra remained in suspense for a minute of agonized nose-blowing before AJ reached toward a green apron slung over the oven door handle.

"I will be merciful to you in your time of suffering and refrain from commenting on _this_ ," said AJ as he unfolded the apron to reveal faded cursive script advertising the Gentlemen's French Folk Dance Troupe of Tadmeadow. "I saw there was something written on it, so I had a look while you were gone, and, let me tell you, I was not disappointed."

"There's nothing embarrassing about that! It was a lovely organization, and they distributed very useful merchandise."

"And only last week you led me to believe that you didn't dance at all. If I had known then what I know now. . . ." The glint in AJ's eyes made Ezra grateful that Bee was unlikely to enlist their help in future dance parties. "What sort of getup did you wear in this troupe, and do you, by any chance, still have it lying around?"

"I distinctly remember hearing that you weren't going to comment!" When AJ laughed, Ezra persisted: "You cannot tell me that you don't have some getup of your own hidden away in your apartment."

"I will neither confirm nor deny. Have to leave some things to the imagination." AJ lifted his glass to his lips.

Ezra's imagination readily supplied a few choice images. "You probably joined some club where you all sat around wearing leather pants and listening to Queen, or bebop, or something."

AJ narrowly avoided spitting a mouthful of water onto the kitchen floor. "My god, Ezra," he wheezed once he had swallowed, "what kind of fever dreams have you been having?"

"Hopefully none that involve you." Illness evidently did not make him any better at lying.

By eight o'clock, the soup had been consumed, and the dishes, at Ezra's insistence, had been washed, dried, and put away. He and AJ were bundled in plaid blankets on the couch, conversing as much as their sore throats would allow and working on a jigsaw puzzle that Ezra had set up amid the books on his coffee table. The picture on the puzzle was supposed to represent the end of the world, and Ezra and AJ had spent the last ten minutes searching for a piece that would complete the body of an alien disembarking from a UFO.

Despite having raided the bottle of Tylenol in Ezra's medicine cabinet, he and AJ were still miserable. The situation had become so dire that Ezra barely felt a thrill when his hand accidentally touched AJ's over the box of Kleenex. Nonetheless, he did not hint that AJ should leave, and AJ, for his part, remained rooted to the couch, even when Ezra yawned and rubbed his glassy eyes.

"Getting tired?" AJ asked.

"Yes." Ezra pulled his blanket more tightly around him. "I know it's early, but I feel awful. How are you?"

"'Awful' doesn't do it justice. I must still have a fever. Can't tell if I'm too hot or too cold."

"There's a thermometer in the bathroom. I can go get it if you want."

AJ shrugged his plaid-covered shoulders. "Why not? Let me have it."

"This isn't one of those things you have to stick up your ass, is it?" he asked when Ezra returned from the bathroom and handed him the thermometer.

"No, of course not."

"That's good. You'd at least have to buy me dinner before you could make me use one of those." His lips curled into a smirk around the thermometer.

Too tired to think of a sufficiently platonic comeback, Ezra burrowed back into his blanket and nursed his half-empty mug of chamomile tea.

The thermometer delivered a succession of warning beeps after a couple of minutes. "Yeah, it's a fever," AJ reported. "Not a bad one, though."

They stared at each other from opposite ends of the couch, and Ezra realized that having AJ absent from his apartment would be drearier than the ominous grey skies at the edges of the apocalyptic puzzle. "Do you want to sleep on my couch?" he asked before he had a chance to second-guess himself. "You might not be able to drive safely, with your fever and all."

"Do you mind? I mean, do you want me to stay here?"

"I don't mind."

"All right then." A groggy smile spread over AJ's flushed face. "I don't normally go to bed until late, but I can turn in early for one night."

"I have a spare toothbrush you can use, and a pillow, and I'll show you where things are in the bathroom," Ezra rambled.

AJ poked a leg encased in black jeans from under his blanket. "Got anything I could wear? These clothes aren't exactly comfortable for sleeping."

"I'll lend you some pajamas. You won't have to sleep naked or anything like that."

AJ tilted his head to one side. "Why would you automatically assume I was going to sleep naked?"

"No specific reason," Ezra stammered, inwardly cursing his wayward imagination, "only . . . I don't want my couch to get dirty."

"Does the 'no nudity' rule apply only to the couch, or—"

Ezra frantically tried to regain control of the conversation. "Just . . . please wear clothing in my apartment, AJ."

"That's no problem. Let me know if you change your mind, though."

Ezra hid his face behind a tissue and blew his nose.

After fetching AJ's toothbrush, pillow, and pajamas, Ezra wished his friend a perfunctory good night and shut himself in his bedroom, where he waited for a solid forty minutes before venturing to open the door and creep down the hallway to the bathroom. Only when he had dashed back to the safety of his bedroom, not allowing himself the merest glance toward the darkened living room, did he don his own pajamas and climb into bed.

He lay on his back, with his head propped up to clear his sinuses, and closed his eyes. Instead of sinking into unconsciousness, however, his mind morphed into a flashing neon sign announcing that he and AJ Crowley were about to sleep under the same roof.

A light knock at the door jolted him out of a captivating reverie that entailed neither clothing nor clean couches.

"Ezra?" AJ called softly from the other side of the door. "Are you awake?"

Ezra switched on the bedside light and whisked the daydream into the shadowy corners of his mind. "Yes? Who is it? I mean . . . never mind."

"Can I come in?"

"Um, y-yes," Ezra answered, pulling his quilt up to his chin.

AJ opened the door and leaned against the doorframe in what might have been a provocative pose if he hadn't been rubbing his nose against the back of his finger. He wore the pajamas that Ezra had lent him, the only black set that Ezra owned. AJ had joked that they were too elegant for him, but Ezra privately disagreed, even though he could see that the pants were slightly short on AJ and a bit large in the waist. He had left the shirt unbuttoned, revealing a black undershirt that Ezra made an intense effort to ignore. Ezra pictured himself as resembling a sort of chameleon, with one eye resolutely trained on AJ's face and the other drifting rebelliously downward.

For one absurd moment, he wondered if AJ wore his sunglasses to bed, but a furtive scan revealed that the glasses were neither over AJ's eyes, nor atop his head, nor hooked onto his shirt. AJ seemed more vulnerable without his shades, and Ezra's nerves grew calmer, until AJ cleared his throat and announced, "I have a problem."

"A problem?" Ezra's tired brain flipped through several possibilities and concluded that AJ must have clogged the toilet or needed to perform some bizarre fetish before he could fall asleep. "Oh god, what is it?"

"Calm down, it's nothing serious. My feet hang off the edge of the couch."

"What?"

"I'm too tall for your couch."

"Oh." Relief at the simplicity of the problem, combined with cold-induced exhaustion, directed Ezra toward one simple solution. "Sorry about that. You can sleep here if you want." He nodded toward the empty stretch of queen-size mattress next to him.

AJ raised his eyebrows. "Really? Where are you going to sleep?"

"There's plenty of room. See?" Ezra shifted so far to the edge of the bed that he almost fell off and had to let go of the blankets to clutch the edge of the mattress. He snatched the covers back before AJ could look too closely at the little slice of exposed skin where the lapels of his blue-striped pajamas met.

"Are you that chilly? Have you taken your temperature?" AJ frowned as Ezra pulled the blankets up to his nose.

"What? No, it's nothing, just the same cold you have." Ezra lowered the quilt a couple of inches. "It's safe to sleep here," he hastened to add. "You won't catch any worse germs from me."

"That's all right. I was just making sure you're not dying from the plague or something."

"No, no, nothing like that. I've never felt better," Ezra claimed for the second time that day.

"Never felt better. Is that so?"

"I mean, aside from being sick. Anyway, go get your pillow from the couch. It belongs on the bed."

AJ disappeared into the hallway and returned promptly with the pillow in one hand and his phone in the other. "Are you really sure I can sleep here?"

"Yes! You always hate when I ask if you're sure about things. Now I know why," Ezra grumbled, giving the room a belated survey to ensure that no embarrassing clutter was lying around. He was thankful for his own tidy habits, which extended to everything except his books.

AJ closed the bedroom door with a decisive click and circled around to the vacant side of the mattress.

Ezra expected the next moments to take place in dramatic slow motion, but it seemed that he barely had time to blink before AJ was lying within arm's reach, coughing as he pulled the blankets up to his chest. He settled onto his side, facing Ezra. "This is much better. Plenty of room for my feet."

"That's good," Ezra addressed the ceiling. "Can I turn the light out now?"

"Fine by me."

Ezra snapped the bedside lamp off and dared to ease the blankets downward, until they were under his chin. He had succeeded in closing his eyes when a burst of artificial light flared on his right. "AJ, what are you doing? I was about to fall asleep."

"Sorry, just checking my phone." They squinted at each other for a moment before AJ turned the phone off, making the shadows in the room appear darker by contrast. "Out of habit, I guess, though I don't know why I bothered. Most of the time, I'm checking for texts from you."

"Well, I obviously didn't send you any texts. I'm right here."

"I'm well aware of that, Ezra." He chuckled to himself. "You know, with the lighting from my phone, you looked like you belonged in the 'Bohemian Rhapsody' video."

"What?" Ezra yawned.

"Like, at the beginning, when it's mostly dark, except their faces are lit from below, and they kind of look like disembodied heads, you know?"

"Not really, no."

"Oh my god, have you never seen it?"

"Maybe I have and forgot about it."

"You wouldn't forget it if you'd actually seen it. Here, let's watch it." AJ turned his phone on again.

"AJ, we are sick and need to sleep!"

"Well, no one will give you a better lullaby than Queen. Come on, Ezra, be hospitable."

AJ navigated to the YouTube app and located the video within seconds. "Are you sure you can see?" he asked before playing it.

"Yes, just turn the screen more toward me."

"It feels like you're over in the next galaxy. Bring your pillow over here, if you like."

Ezra sighed, but he wasn't necessarily reluctant to push his pillow against AJ's. "I suppose this is an improvement," he admitted, lowering his head onto the pillow and registering the heat that radiated from AJ's body.

"Hold on," AJ said. "Lift your head for me again." Ezra obeyed, and AJ curled his arms around Ezra's shoulders. "Comfortable?" he asked, his breath hot against Ezra's temple.

Ezra was so comfortable that it almost frightened him. "Yes, I'm fine."

"You feel tense." AJ rubbed Ezra's upper arm. "Is everything all right?"

"Yes, I've never felt bet— I already told you I'm fine." As if to prove the point, he nestled his head against AJ's shoulder, although he kept his lower body angled away from AJ's. "Let's watch your video."

"Is this the real life?" the vocals began, and Ezra was immediately reminded of their first ride together in the Bentley, six weeks ago. That brief commute had seemed so surreal at the time, but now it felt mundane in comparison with the fantasy currently playing out in Ezra's bedroom.

Ezra did not think that he looked one bit like the band members—for one thing, they had far more hair than he did. Then again, the video occupied only a sliver of his attention. Most of his mind was focused on how solid and warm AJ felt next to him and how AJ drummed his fingers against Ezra's shoulder in time to the beat. After the first few minutes of the song, his hand stopped following the rhythm and simply stroked back and forth over Ezra's pajamas, lulling Ezra into a doze.

Somewhere in his receding consciousness, he heard AJ asking, "Do you want to watch another?" And then after a second: "Oh, look at you. You're asleep already."

His eyes jumped open when he sensed the pressure of AJ's cheek against the top of his head, but sleep quickly overtook him once more.

Falling asleep in the shelter of AJ's arm did not protect Ezra against the ravages of the common cold. He tossed and turned throughout the night, sometimes colliding with AJ, mumbling an apology, and flailing back toward his side of the bed. He finally awoke a couple of feet away from AJ, who had somehow wedged his head under his pillow during the night and was emitting an occasional snore.

Illness had made Ezra's mouth dry and foul-tasting, so, after staring at AJ's unconscious form for a slightly indecent length of time, he rolled out of bed and went to the bathroom to drink some water and brush his teeth. He came back to find AJ groaning from under his pillow as he stretched his limbs. "AJ? How are you feeling?"

AJ shoved the pillow off his face and pushed himself up on his elbows, blinking dazedly in the pale light that squeezed through the blinds. "Huh? Oh, right, good m—" He broke into a volley of coughs. "Fuck this cold."

"I'll get you some water," Ezra said. When he delivered the drink in a glass from the kitchen, AJ was sitting up in bed, with his pillow propped against the wall. He looked attractively rumpled and stubbly in a way that no man holding a fistful of used Kleenex had any right to be.

He scrutinized Ezra while drinking his water. "I don't know why you went to all that effort to hide under your blankets. Those pajamas suit you."

"I didn't want you to tease me about them."

"I wouldn't do that." Seeing Ezra's skeptical expression, he smiled and clarified, "All right, maybe I would, but only because I don't have any other way to say your little habits are charming."

"You could just say that they're charming."

"What's the fun in that? Anyway, don't stand there like a sleep paralysis demon. Get back in if you want to. It's your bed, after all."

Ezra couldn't resist following AJ's lead. He rested his pillow against the wall and sat with the blankets pulled up to his waist.

"So, how many of _these_ books have you read?" asked AJ, pointing toward the bookcases opposite the bed, and, before Ezra knew it, the flow of conversation had swept away much of the lingering awkwardness between them. Half a mattress separated them, but somehow that distance no longer seemed quite so platonic, if it ever had been in the first place.

By the time AJ left later that morning, citing his urgent need for coffee, Ezra had forgotten that spending the night together was anything but normal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is getting too cute. I'm gonna go read a horror novel.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this chapter way later than I intended, but time is just a construct, right? Anyway, there are plenty of fun goings-on in this one.

AJ was both the first and the last person whom Ezra expected to see approaching the nonfiction desk at 10:00 AM on Monday. The last, because Monday mornings typically found AJ hunched over his coffee in the staff office, dispensing scowls to everyone in his vicinity. The first, because AJ sauntered so frequently into Ezra's daydreams that his arrival in physical form simply seemed like a natural progression of events.

By this time, the AJ of Ezra's thoughts had assembled a repertoire of activities that extended far beyond sauntering. Nonetheless, he withdrew like a fading echo when the real AJ propped an elbow against the elevated portion of the desk and said, "Good morning, Ezra."

"Hello, what are you doing here?" was Ezra's flustered greeting.

"Damn, is that how you welcome patrons to the library?"

"Obviously not. You texted last night that you had, and I quote, 'a million things' to do in the office today."

"Yeah, and one of those things is taking a break." AJ rested his chin on his palm. "How's your cold?"

"Much better. It's mostly just a cough now."

"Same here. You know," AJ mused in a lower tone, "I'd probably still be sneezing every two seconds if I hadn't gotten such a good sleep on Friday."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"What I mean to say is that you have a very comfortable bed, Ezra."

"I . . . I agree," said Ezra, trying to keep a firm hold on his composure. "I should know; I sleep there every night."

The corners of AJ's mouth turned playfully downward. "You don't get many sleepover invitations?"

"Why, do you?"

"Recently?" AJ drummed his fingers against his cheek in mock thoughtfulness. "I can think of only one. Guess I'm not very popular."

"It must all your black clothes. They scare people off."

"Bullshit. If you're any indication, they do the opposite."

Ezra's face crinkled into a smile, but the chime of an email notification redirected his attention toward more mundane matters. "Do you remember that we have to help at the pop-up library on Saturday?" he asked while he perused his inbox. "Pepper sent out a reminder earlier this morning."

The library sometimes set up a booth at local events to distribute free books, give recommendations, and answer questions from prospective patrons. This weekend the pop-up was scheduled to appear at a nearby nature center for their annual open house.

"That's this Saturday already?" AJ rubbed his forehead and coughed wearily. "The email must have gotten lost in my backlog. Can you text me the time we need to be there?"

"I'll do it later. Tracy just emailed me something about her book club for patrons, and I have to respond. To be honest," Ezra continued as he typed a salutation to Tracy, "I forgot about the pop-up. I'm not sure I have it recorded in my calendar."

"Well, whatever time it's at, I'll give you a ride there and back."

"Oh, thank you." Ezra's cursor blinked impatiently while it waited for him to finish beaming at his friend.

"I'll leave you to it," AJ said after a moment. "Lunch on the balcony today?"

"That would be lovely." Ezra returned to his keyboard, allowing book clubs, midday meals, and sleepovers to crowd out all other concerns.

Ezra had known that he would feel guilty about concealing AJ's overnight visit from Ana. He tried to adhere as close to the truth as possible, telling her that he and AJ had been too sick to go out (accurate) and that AJ had merely dropped him off at home (slightly less accurate). A series of misleading statements, he told himself, was categorically different from an outright falsehood.

What he hadn't anticipated was his discomfort on the following Friday morning, when he announced to Ana that he and AJ would venture again to the Nightingale. Predictably, Ana concluded that they were going on a date, a presumption that Ezra disputed with his usual vehemence. Each denial, though, felt more like a lie than the last, forcing Ezra to admit to himself that even if this wasn't a date, he desperately wanted it to be one.

Date or no date, Friday evening found Ezra and AJ tucked into a small round booth at the pub, their knees touching under a rickety wooden table. The bartender was rattling off the last question in that week's trivia game, which centered on European history: "What major highway in the United Kingdom opened in 1975?"

AJ sipped his cider reflectively. "I think I once read somewhere that it's the M25. Write that down for me, will you?"

Ezra, whose gin and tonic had gone straight to his head, misheard him and wrote "N25" on their paper. "No, not _n_ ," said AJ. "It's _m_. _M_ as in _me_."

"What about you? Did you build the road or something?"

"No, here, let me do it." Sidling closer to Ezra, AJ plucked the pencil from his hand and replaced his neat _n_ with a scrawled _m_.

"Ohhh," Ezra sighed in comprehension. They laughed together, the cider on AJ's breath mixing with Ezra's gin-soaked exhalations to create their own private cocktail.

They were not nearly as invested in the trivia game as they had been on their first visit, and Ezra raised no complaints about fairness when Mort once again skulked from his corner table to claim his prize. The only thing Ezra regretted after the game was that the evening seemed to be elapsing far too quickly. He stole a glance at a clock on an adjacent wall and was almost surprised to see that the hands were not speeding around like AJ on the Autobahn.

Ezra comforted himself with the knowledge that they would reunite on the following day. "We have the pop-up at the nature center tomorrow," he pointed out after their server had delivered their meals.

AJ looked up from his steak and ale pie. "Weren't you going to text me about that? I never got around to reading that email from Pepper."

"No need to text now. I think the email said that it starts at 1:00." Ezra refused to spend his evening trawling through his inbox to confirm the time.

"Sounds about right to me." After some contemplative chewing, AJ put his utensils down on his plate and rested his elbows on the table. "Question for you."

Ezra froze with a forkful of fried fish lifted halfway to his mouth. "What is it?"

"Since we both need to go to that thing tomorrow, can I stay at your place tonight?"

Ezra's hand grew slack, and the piece of fish plopped back onto his plate. "Oh, um, yes, of course," he stammered as he retrieved the morsel, trying to keep his voice neutral. "That seems very sensible."

"I can just sleep on the floor. Don't know why I didn't think of that last week."

Ezra swallowed his mouthful of fish so hastily that his throat hurt. "You don't have to sleep on the floor. We can . . . you know . . . follow the same arrangement."

"Arrangement? You mean you've still got some room for me in that comfortable bed of yours?"

Ezra's heart twisted itself into a knot, as if it were auditioning to be one of his bowties. "You said yourself that there's plenty of room."

"But I don't want to impose on you and be a pushy little bastard."

"Give yourself some credit, AJ." Ezra's patted his friend's arm, grateful to the gin for supplying a comeback when the rest of his brain was tongue-tied. "You're a medium-sized bastard, at the very least."

"I'll take that as a compliment," AJ laughed. He caught Ezra's hand as it rose from his arm and set their clasped hands on the table between them. "You didn't answer my question, though."

"What question?"

"Am I imposing on you?"

"No, not at all. You're welcome to stay with me. As I said, it's the most sensible thing to do when we're commuting together tomorrow."

"I wouldn't dare question your good sense." AJ gave his hand a squeeze and released it. "So, my second sleepover in two weeks," he remarked as he returned to his meal. "I must really be getting pretty popular in these parts."

"Don't let it go to your head."

"Too late for that."

Ezra rolled his eyes and revived his nerves with a generous sip of his cocktail. "I shouldn't have anything more to drink after this. It wouldn't do to be hungover at a family-friendly event."

"Absolutely unthinkable," AJ agreed dryly. "It's really too bad we have to work tomorrow. I was going to suggest that we do shots later in your apartment."

"Shots of what?"

"I don't know, whatever you have on hand. I spied some bottles in your cabinet last week."

"Well, you can go ahead and do your shots, but don't expect me to be there tomorrow with aspirin for your headache."

"Yeah, right," said AJ, stealing a fry from Ezra's plate. "Now that you've thought of it, you'll have a whole bottle of aspirin ready for me, with a fancy ribbon tied in a bow around it."

"I would _not_. That would be a waste of ribbon."

"Methinks the man doth protest too much." AJ crunched down on another fry.

"Stop misquoting Shakespeare at me and eat your dinner. Your _own_ dinner, not the one I'm paying for."

AJ didn't skip a beat. "I'll pay for your dinner."

"I . . . I wasn't implying that you should."

AJ shrugged and loaded steak onto his fork. "If that's what I need to do to ensure continued access to your fries."

"I'll buy my own meal. But thank you. That's very generous."

"Don't mention it." AJ continued demolishing his pie and then tapped the tip of his knife on Ezra's plate. "Here, how's this for a compromise: I'll buy a dessert for us to share."

"That would be nice." He thought it would be more than _nice_ , but "so wonderful and just the sort of thing you would do if we were on a date, which we're obviously not, but perhaps we should be" didn't roll off the tongue quite as smoothly.

Companionable silence fell between them until the server had cleared away their dinner dishes and taken their dessert order. AJ chose this juncture to fish his phone from his pocket and beckon to Ezra: "I've been meaning to show you something."

Ezra tore his thoughts from the chocolate cake that would soon grace their table. "Yes? What is it, another Queen video?"

"Not quite. The other day, I googled your folk dance troupe."

Ezra felt his eyes widen in horror. "Oh, no."

"Oh, _yes_." AJ's grin intensified with each tap of his fingers on his phone. "Did you know that there's a video of you online?"

Ezra nearly upended the table in his hurry to slide across the two feet of seat cushion that separated him from AJ. "What on earth did you find?" he demanded, with his hip pressed against AJ's and his hand gripping his friend's shoulder as he leaned in for a glimpse of the screen.

"I mean, there are other people in the video, too," AJ added, "but you're the star in my eyes. I had no idea you could move your legs like that."

"Like _what_?"

"You should know. You're the one who did the dance. Here, look." AJ turned the phone toward Ezra. "You're in some sort of chorus line with these other guys, and you're all prancing around looking like you're having the time of your lives."

"That is not a chorus line, AJ," Ezra retorted, still with his hand on AJ's shoulder. "It's called a gavotte, and it was carefully choreographed. We weren't just moving at random."

"Oh, don't get me wrong. I never said it wasn't sophisticated as hell."

"You said I was 'prancing around.' That doesn't exactly connote sophistication."

"Ezra, you have a remarkable talent for remembering every single word that comes out of my mouth. It's truly impressive."

"You've told me something like that before. . . . Wait, no . . . oh god," Ezra groaned, while AJ's shoulder shook with laughter under his hand.

"Don't be embarrassed," AJ chuckled. "I'm flattered." He tried to stifle his merriment, but it came rolling back within seconds. "I'm imagining that you write down all the shit I say into your diary, so you can commit it to memory."

"I have never done any such thing, and I never will."

"Do you study it every night before bed? If so, don't let me cut into your routine."

"Our server is coming with the cake, so you can kindly shut up now."

Ezra wondered if he had taken a wrong turn in his apartment and strayed into someone else's life when he entered his bedroom later that night and beheld AJ lounging under the sheets as if he belonged there. Ezra had lent him the same black pajamas as before, but this week AJ had fastened all the shirt buttons, so Ezra couldn't tell if he was wearing an undershirt beneath. The ambiguity was vaguely unsettling, but, then again, Ezra had always enjoyed curling up in bed with a good mystery.

AJ looked up from his phone as Ezra closed the bedroom door. "There you are. Seemed like you were in the bathroom for years." His gaze promptly dropped south. "Different pajamas this week?"

Ezra glanced down at his ivory-colored sleepwear, pushing aside any nagging self-consciousness. "Yes, I do laundry every Sunday." He took a step toward the bed. "Pardon me, AJ, but that's the side where I usually sleep."

"All right, you don't have to make a formal request. I was only warming it up for you." AJ shifted to the middle of the mattress and plumped a spare pillow under his head.

The mention of laundry raised a question in Ezra's mind while he eased himself under the deliciously preheated sheets. "Are you going to wear your clothes from today to the nature center? Aren't they dirty?"

"They're fine. I can always make a quick trip to my place in the morning, if I need to change. What time did you say that thing starts? 1:00?"

"Yes, I believe so." Ezra groped for his phone on the bedside table, meaning to locate Pepper's email, but he paused when AJ inched closer to him and asked, "Do you want revenge for the dancing video I found?"

"Revenge? What kind of revenge?"

"Don't get nervous," AJ said, picking up his phone again. "I'm just showing you an old picture, not telling you to tie me up and whip me."

Ezra did not find this entirely reassuring. "A picture of what?"

"Here." AJ turned his phone to Ezra. "If you think your dancing was embarrassing, check out this motherfucker."

Amusement displaced Ezra's wariness as he examined the smirking, sunglass-shaded face on the screen. "Is that you? Your hair's so much longer!" His eyes traced the sweep of AJ's loose locks down to the shoulders of his black leather jacket. "When was this taken?"

"Oh, ages ago. Do you like it?" 

Ezra was determined to avoid any unnecessary inflation of AJ's ego. "Your hair looks very clean and well-kept. I'll give you that."

AJ huffed out a laugh. "You really know how to dish out compliments, don't you?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude," Ezra relented.

"No offense taken, so don't bother breaking out the etiquette manual. Anyhow, that evens the score between us." AJ tossed the phone to the far end of the bed. "What's next on your evening agenda?"

Ezra was too busy retrieving his own phone from the nightstand to ponder the implications of this question. "You're always showing me things on your phone, so I might as well do the same."

"What are you pulling up, a YouTube channel where you review bowties?"

"Someday, AJ, hopefully in the near future, you will run out of jokes about my bowties."

"Maybe you'll show me your advice column where you teach manners to assholes who make fun of your bowties."

"Unfortunately not. It's only a picture of me from several years ago." Ezra opened a photo from one of his carefully categorized folders of images and tilted the screen toward AJ. "What do you think?"

The picture captured Ezra feeding ducks at a public pond while wearing a particularly starchy suit. Neither the waterfowl nor the starch, however, attracted AJ's notice. "Oh my god," he guffawed, "what happened to your sideburns? Why were they so long?"

"I thought they looked very distinguished at the time."

"Maybe if you were living in the 1800s." AJ's gaze flipped from the phone to Ezra's currently clean-shaven face. "Did you land any dates with those things?"

"It's awfully shallow of you to think that people wouldn't date me because of my hair."

"No, you misunderstood me. I'm sure you were a real hit with the gents. You know what they say: big sideburns mean you've got a big dick to match."

The task of replacing his phone on the nightstand allowed Ezra to conceal the worst of his blush. "People say that about _noses_ , not sideburns. Or is it feet? Either way, it's a ridiculous notion."

"Is it, though? You like your appearance to be all coordinated, so if you come out with sideburns blazing, it's only logical to assume that you're well-endowed across the board. You know, like having your purse match your shoes."

"Nobody does that anymore, AJ. And your idea isn't logical at all. It's completely absurd."

"Oh, well, feel free to prove me wrong anytime." AJ patted the chest pocket of Ezra's pajamas as if he'd just tucked a paper invitation in there.

Ezra resorted to indignation to keep the conversation under control. "You're acting as if you've taken leave of your senses. Did you raid my kitchen and do shots while I was in the bathroom?"

"I am not the least bit drunk," AJ declared. "Come here and smell my breath if you need evidence."

"I have no interest in putting my nose anywhere near your mouth." It wasn't Ezra's worst lie of all time, but it definitely ranked in the top ten.

"Really, Ezra? Don't make me break out 'the man doth protest too much' twice in one night."

Ezra let out a gusty sigh. "Let's go to sleep before you become even more insufferable." He shut off the bedside lamp and stretched out with his back to AJ, his smile safely hidden behind the sheets.

"Why am I not surprised that you have a ludicrously early bedtime?" AJ yawned, near enough that Ezra could feel himself sliding ever so slightly toward where his friend's weight depressed the mattress. "If I keep spending the night here, I'm going to end up on an actual sleep schedule."

"Isn't it nice?" Ezra asked, his voice muffled by his pillow.

AJ didn't inquire if Ezra was referring to the "sleep schedule" part or the "spending the night" part. "Oh, it's very nice," he murmured into the dark.

Ezra's eyes flickered open to the realization that his bed had undergone a peculiar transformation. Not only had his cocoon of blankets grown inexplicably heavier, but the sheets had also attained a miraculous degree of coziness, especially where they pressed against his back. Getting out of bed under these conditions was unthinkable, despite the allure of the morning sunshine that suffused the room. Ezra drew a contented breath, shut his eyes again, and curled his hands up toward his chest, only to discover that somebody else's hand had already laid claim over that spot.

AJ must have felt the jolt of surprise that ran down Ezra's spine, because he lifted his face from where it had been buried in Ezra's hair and slurred, "What happened?"

Ezra froze. "N-nothing. Sorry."

"God," AJ groaned after clearing his throat, "you're such a bad liar. What startled you like that?"

"I said it was nothing." Ezra hesitated before venturing to add, "I suppose I should go back to my side of the bed."

AJ paused. "All right, if that's what you want." He unwound his arm from Ezra's chest, yet he spoke as if Ezra had suggested that they spend the morning writing an entire month's worth of emails. A wheedling note crept into his voice as he watched Ezra sit up. "What's wrong? You don't like it over here with me?"

"No, I do," Ezra admitted before he could stop himself. "But I don't want to make you uncomfortable."

"Is that all that's bothering you?" AJ sighed. "Look, I promise I'm not uncomfortable." He patted the pillow that they had been sharing. "Be a good host and keep me company."

Ezra required no additional coaxing. "You're a very demanding guest" was his only complaint as he settled onto his back with AJ's arm wrapped around his shoulders, in the same position in which they had fallen asleep together on the previous weekend.

"Next time I'll say 'please,'" AJ whispered huskily in Ezra's ear, so close that his lips brushed Ezra's skin when they shaped the letter _p_.

Ezra felt his insides wring themselves out like wet washcloths, releasing a trickle of warm anticipation. He cast around for something to say that would draw him back to reality. "You'll probably be wanting some coffee, but I'm afraid I still don't have any."

AJ's fingers gently massaged Ezra's shoulder. "Don't worry about that. I'm not thinking about coffee right now."

"You can have some of my cocoa, if you like."

"You and your goddamn cocoa." AJ's disarmingly light tone left Ezra unprepared for his next words: "I bet you taste like a cup of hot chocolate, Ezra."

"You . . . you think so?" Ezra's fingers tightened into a fist around the blanket that he held against his chest.

"Mm-hmm," AJ answered, using his free hand to straighten the collar of Ezra's pajamas. "You always taste so sweet in my dreams."

Ezra widened his eyes at the ceiling before swiveling them in AJ's direction, as if hoping to find that AJ was addressing a picture of chocolate cake on his phone. Even a fleeting glance, though, was enough to confirm the absence of any intervening technology. Ezra was left with no choice but to ask, "Do you mean you want to kiss me?"

The question hung in the air for one terrifying second, during which Ezra wished for an abrupt end to the world, and then AJ burst the tension with a sharp " _Huh?_ " He pulled his arm out from under Ezra's shoulders so that he could prop himself up and peer incredulously into Ezra's face. "Ezra, how the hell is that news to you?"

"What do you mean? You've never said anything like that before!"

"Do you think I just go around casually spooning my coworkers and asking them how they taste?"

"No, of course not."

"Then what else could I possibly have been trying to tell you? What about before today? Do you think I haven't been flirting with you for weeks?"

"I don't know!" Ezra sensed that his position was growing indefensible. "You should have said it clearly instead of talking in riddles."

"Well then, it's time for me to be crystal clear. Pay attention and don't get distracted." AJ tapped one of his index fingers against Ezra's chest. "There is one person I would like to kiss—that means on the mouth, at least for starters—and that one person is _you_ , you cocoa-drinking, bowtie-wearing fool." He poked Ezra's chest again for emphasis. "Do you need further clarification?"

"You aren't being very nice," Ezra tried to object, but the little stream of desire within him had become a flood. He reached for AJ, dithering about where he wanted his fingers to land first, but AJ caught his hands and held them in midair.

"No, no, hold on a minute," AJ said. "You have your clarity, but I still need mine." With a recklessly affectionate grin, he interlaced their fingers and planted their joined hands on either side of Ezra's head. "No kiss for you until you tell me in plain English that you want me."

Ezra gulped, in part because he now had an unimpeded view down the front of AJ's pajama top and could perceive that AJ was very much not wearing an undershirt. "Yes, obviously."

AJ arched an eyebrow. He was so close that Ezra could have counted the tiny flecks of gold in his irises. "Ezra, you're a librarian. You've got all these books which you may or may not have read. So many words, and you can't spare more than two to admit you like me?" His voice resumed its wheedling. "You're the one who's not being very nice."

"Now you're just teasing me!"

"Then do what you need to do and shut me up." AJ's own resolve was evidently wavering, since a single sheet of paper from the stack of unread books on the nightstand could barely have slid into the space between his mouth and Ezra's jaw. "Come on, sweetheart, say it for me." He dipped his head lower and whispered a soft "Please" into the hollow at the base of Ezra's throat.

Ezra's breath hitched. "I—"

A sudden buzz from the bedside table startled him into silence. "What's that?" he gasped, craning his neck toward the sound.

AJ gave his hands a reassuring squeeze. "Relax, it's only your phone."

The vibrations persisted, however, and Ezra darted an apologetic glance at AJ, whose lips were now hovering over his right cheek. "Someone's calling. I should see who it is."

"Let them leave a message, Ezra. You're busy."

"I know, but . . . if I don't see who it is now, I'll just keep thinking about it, and I really don't want to think about anything right now except you."

This hurried confession brightened AJ's smile, even as he grudgingly released Ezra's hands. "Go on and check your phone. But if you end up ditching me for a spam call, I'll never let you hear the end of it."

"I need only a moment. Be patient."

"I'll be waiting for you," AJ replied in a low pitch that tempted Ezra to reject the call outright. That is, until he noticed his supervisor's name printed across the screen in bold black letters. His heart skipped a beat, although, at this point, all of the skipped beats might have cancelled each other out and returned his heart to its accustomed cadence.

"I need to get this," he said in a rush and answered the call before AJ could launch a protest. "Hello?"

"Hi, Ezra! It's Mary. How are you doing this morning?"

"Oh . . . I'm doing well. Never felt better."

AJ let out an amused snort, but Mary gave no indication that she had heard. "That's wonderful! It's a gorgeous day, isn't it? Glad we get to be outside. Anyway, I'm just making sure you're all set for the pop-up today."

"Oh, of course, I can't wait," Ezra chirped.

"Excellent! I also need to give you directions to the correct entrance at the nature center. The last time we did a pop-up here, some of us came in the wrong way and got lost." She proceeded to provide directions that barely crossed the threshold of Ezra's mind.

"Thank you," he managed to say. "I'll try to remember that."

"Yep, no problem. I'll see you at 9:30!"

Ezra's spine stiffened. "Wait, what time?"

"9:30?" Mary repeated. "That's when the event starts, you know? Tracy and Pepper and I are already here to set up, but you don't need to come over yet. I hope there was no confusion about that."

"No, no, not at all," Ezra stammered as he eyed the clock on his bedside table.

"What's going on?" he heard AJ hiss concernedly.

"The pop-up," Ezra mouthed, grimacing to convey urgency.

AJ raised his eyebrows. "The poppers?"

Ezra mouthed a forceful _no_ and waved at AJ to be quiet as Mary kept talking.

"I guess I'll let you go now," she finished rambling. "Are you okay, Ezra? Did you just go for a run or something? You sound out of breath."

"No, everything's fine. I'll see you soon."

"Oh my god, finally," AJ grumbled once Ezra had ended the call. "Is something wrong?"

Ezra had already pushed aside the blankets and bounced out of bed. "I made a mistake!" he called over his shoulder en route to his closet.

"A mistake? What kind of mistake? Who was that on the phone?"

Ezra grabbed a pair of pants from the closet and spun around to face the bed, gesticulating with the hanger. "Mary said that the pop-up starts at 9:30, not 1:00, which means we have to be there in less than an hour, which means you need to get up now, which means you should have just kissed me instead of asking me all those questions!"

They stared at each other for a moment in tousle-haired, half-aroused dismay before AJ groaned, "Oh, fuck," flung himself onto his pillow, and pulled the blankets over his head.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently the real slow burn here is how goddamn long it took me to post this chapter lol. Sorry that I left y'all on such a cliffhanger. This is not only the longest chapter yet, but it also ends with a paragraph that has been sitting in my drafts for months and that I absolutely love!

Ezra hovered beside the bed and entreated AJ to emerge, like a timid snake charmer coaxing a sexually frustrated cobra out of its lair.

"I'm so sorry about everything, AJ, but _please_ get up and get ready for work." Ezra would have wrung his hands if he hadn't still been holding the pants and hanger that he had pulled from his closet. "Please, I need to make the bed before we leave, and I can't do that while you're in it."

AJ pushed aside the blankets and fixed Ezra with a disgruntled stare. "How do you have time to make the bed but not to kiss me?"

"Those are two completely different things!"

"Are they? Kind of a blow to the ego to have a pointless chore be my big rival."

"Making the bed is not pointless," Ezra started to argue, but a glance at the clock on the nightstand pushed him toward a quick compromise. "Very well," he sighed, "I suppose I don't need to make the bed. Now, will you be so kind as to get up?"

" _Will you be so kind_ ," AJ muttered as he dragged himself into a sitting position. "What kind of passive aggressive bullshit—"

"Your clothes are on the chair by the closet, if you recall," Ezra interrupted. Determined not to waste any more time, he laid his work pants and their hanger on the bed in preparation for selecting a shirt. However, this sartorial project skidded to an abrupt halt when he spied AJ unfastening the top button of his pajamas.

Ezra took a hasty step backward and lifted his outstretched hands as a shield against the seductive power of an empty buttonhole. "Oh, sorry. I'll go wait in the living room until you're ready."

AJ rolled his eyes. "My god, Ezra, I'm not some gay version of Medusa. You're not going to turn to stone if you see my nipples." He undid another button.

"I'm only trying to give you privacy and keep us focused on work."

"Fine, I take back what I said about you turning to stone."

"Thank you. I appreciate it." Ezra stayed long enough to see a third button turned loose before he retreated to the door.

"You might still turn to wood, though," AJ called after him. Ezra declined to dignify this with a response.

He puttered around the living room until he heard AJ enter the bathroom, at which point he crept back into the bedroom. He had finished picking out his outfit and was halfway through making the bed when AJ reappeared in the doorway. Mercifully, he was fully clothed.

"What happened to staying in the living room?" AJ paused upon seeing a pillow in Ezra's hand. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing important." Ezra tossed the pillow to the foot of the mattress, as if an orderly bed were the last thing on his mind.

"You're making the bed, aren't you?"

"No, not at all. I'm tidying it so it's easier to make later."

AJ perched on the edge of the mattress and crossed his arms. "So, if you have time to make—sorry, _tidy_ —the bed, maybe you also have a free minute for other activities."

"Would these other activities involve messing up the bed?"

"Possibly."

"That seems counterproductive, don't you think?"

AJ slumped against the mattress with a groan.

Suppressing a smile, Ezra gathered his work clothes into a neat pile and asked, "Is the bathroom available now?"

"Yeah, go ahead." AJ propped himself up on an elbow. "Do you want me to be a gentleman and await you in the parlor?"

"If you don't mind."

"No minding to see here." AJ held out a hand to Ezra. "Help me up off the bed, will you?"

Ezra willed his hands to remain at his sides. "I don't believe you need my help. You'd only pull me down there with you, and then we'd never get to work."

"Here I am politely requesting your assistance, and you accuse me of being some shitty con artist?"

"I know your tricks when I see them, AJ. I am not a sucker."

"Well"—AJ grinned as he rose from the bed—"that remains to be seen, hm?"

"The only thing you should be seeing right now is the door."

When Ezra ventured back into the living room, AJ lay sprawled on the couch, his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses. One of his feet dangled off the armrest, while the other was slung over the top of the couch.

Ezra made sure that he was standing at a safe distance, both from AJ's hands and from his spread legs, before he asked, "Are you sleeping?"

"What? No, just waiting for you." AJ pulled down his shades to peer over the tops at Ezra. "I see you're all wrapped up and tied with a bow."

"If you mean that I got dressed, then yes, that's an accurate observation. Now please get off the couch so we can be punctual. And before you ask: no, I will not help you up."

"Someday, Ezra, you'll be the one who gets bossed around for a change," AJ grumbled as he lowered his feet to the carpet. "By the way, how about making a stop at the coffee shop drive-through?"

"We don't have time for that, AJ. It's already well after nine. They might have coffee at the pop-up."

"I can't take that risk. Coffee is non-negotiable." AJ again inspected Ezra over the rims of his sunglasses and delivered a chilling promise: "Don't worry; with my driving, I'll get us there on time."

When they reached the nature center at 9:30 sharp, Ezra's knuckles were as white as the whipped cream on the large hot cocoa that AJ had insisted on buying for him. The Bentley slowed to a more reasonable speed once they had entered the gravel-strewn parking lot, and Ezra took his first deep breath in what felt like a millennium.

"Mary said something about using a specific entrance, but I'm afraid I forgot her directions," he admitted belatedly.

"It's all right," said AJ. "I was here for last year's pop-up, so I knew where to turn in."

Ezra frowned at this revelation. "If you've been to one of these events before, why didn't you tell me that it happened in the morning? That would have saved us so much trouble."

"I thought it made sense that they would change the time to the afternoon. No one wants to come here at the asscrack of dawn on a Saturday."

"9:30 is not dawn, AJ. Plenty of people are out and about at this time."

"Speak for yourself."

AJ took a few extra minutes to locate a sufficiently isolated parking space, where the Bentley would be less at risk of getting dinged by the doors of inferior vehicles. At 9:34, they finally disembarked from the car and crunched across the parking lot, Ezra glancing with distaste at the dust that was migrating from the gravel to his shoes. His concern shifted from grime to grass stains as they passed under an arbor blazing with spring flowers and walked onto a wide lawn. The left side of the lawn was dotted with white tents for the open house, while the right side held picnic tables, some food trucks, and the nature center's main building, styled as a log cabin.

Despite the debatably early hour, people were already milling around in shorts and sundresses. AJ strode through the small crowd like a shadow, leading Ezra past tents for local vendors and conservation groups. The library's tent, one of the largest of the bunch, stood at the far end of the lawn, next to a booth selling t-shirts adorned with headshots of songbirds.

"Hello!" Mary welcomed Ezra and AJ as they stepped into the shade of the tent. "I didn't know you were arriving together."

"Yes, AJ was generous enough to give me a lift," said Ezra. He returned waves of greeting from Pepper and Tracy, who were arranging books at a nearby table.

"Isn't that nice!" was Mary's friendly reply. "If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered you with my call. I hope I didn't disturb you."

"It was no trouble at all," Ezra assured her. Ignoring AJ's soft sniff of amusement, he added, "In fact, I'm glad you called, Mary. For some reason, I thought the pop-up didn't start until the afternoon."

"Really? We have a couple of volunteers arriving at one, so maybe that's what you were thinking of."

"Probably. I should have read Pepper's email more closely."

"No worries," Mary told him. "Besides, you would have realized your mistake when AJ came."

Ezra blinked. "I beg your pardon?"

"When he came to pick you up for 9:30 instead of in the afternoon. That would've been a sure sign that your timing was off, right?"

"Oh, um, yes, that's true . . . except AJ was relying on me and didn't know the right time either." Honesty had once again gotten the better of Ezra.

Mary lifted her eyebrows in surprise. "Well then, it's lucky you were both able to get here on time, and with your drinks, no less."

"I wouldn't say we got that lucky," AJ interjected.

"He means that we technically got here four minutes late." Ezra resisted the urge to jab a polite elbow into AJ's ribs.

Their supervisor laughed. "Never mind about that! Four minutes don't make any difference. Gosh, AJ, I've never known you to be so concerned about punctuality."

"Guess it's a bad habit I've picked up from Ezra."

"Oh, I'm so glad that you two have become such good buddies!" Mary exclaimed. "Well, whenever you're ready, there are a couple of seats waiting for you. Ezra, why don't you take over the raffle table? I'll show you everything you need to get started."

Ezra spent the next two hours dispensing raffle tickets to a steady stream of people. Pepper handled a book giveaway at a table to his right, while Mary and AJ distributed library brochures and more free books on the opposite side of the tent. Any hope that Ezra might have had of socializing with his colleagues drifted away in a deluge of ticket requests and inquiries about the library. He sometimes managed to catch AJ's eye by craning his neck around an enormous basket of locally baked pastries that constituted one of the raffle prizes. AJ acknowledged Ezra with a salute of his coffee cup but was too busy for any more elaborate responses.

As noon approached, Ezra grew so hungry that he considered pilfering one of the less desirable pastries from the prize basket. His cocoa was long gone, and he had drained a plastic water bottle that Pepper had given him. The weather had progressed from cheerfully sunny to unseasonably hot, and the eyes of the birds printed on the shirts next door appeared to be watching him in the most unnerving manner.

He was grimly fanning his face with a stray brochure when he identified a familiar pair of sunglasses advancing across the tent. Impatient for AJ's arrival, Ezra waited a seeming eon for two elderly women to enter the raffle and then endured another minute of sympathetic nodding as they opined about the weather. "I hope you both have a lovely day," he wished them at last. "Best of luck in the raffle."

"Aren't you an angel?" one of the women cooed. They reshouldered their purses and wandered off to the book giveaway.

AJ promptly planted himself in front of Ezra's table and served up his greeting with a smirk: "Hey there, angel."

Ezra's eager smile shifted into a grimace. "Oh, god. Of all the things you could have overheard, it had to be that."

"Well, to be fair, you did kind of look like an angel in those white pajamas, minus the wings."

"They were ivory, not white." Ezra gave his makeshift fan several vigorous flaps, sensing that his face was in even more urgent need of cooling. "If this is heaven, then it's certainly warmer than I expected."

"You must have wound up in my neck of the woods by accident."

"Your 'neck of the woods'?"

"Hell."

Ezra shook his head. "It's far too humid for me to put up with your nonsense about angels and demons."

"Can you put up with me long enough to get some lunch at the food trucks? Mary said we could take a break."

"Is she sure it's not too busy?"

"No, she said Pepper can take care of the raffle for a bit." AJ circled around to Ezra's side of the table. "Come on, you look hungry."

"I suppose I can use a break." Ezra rose from his seat before AJ could ask if he needed a hand getting up.

A gentle breeze provided relief from the heat as they left the tent, walking so close together that the wind must have struggled to squeeze between them. Awaiting them at the other end of the lawn were the food trucks, each of which had already attracted a cluster of people.

The longest queue of customers belonged to a vehicle that had "The Chow Truck" emblazoned on its hood in bright red letters. Other flashy signage announced that the truck specialized in "Incredible Alternative Proteins," a claim that was just vague enough to be intriguing. The line was moving quickly despite its length, so Ezra agreed to join AJ in investigating the truck's offerings.

"What's in your burger?" AJ called up to the truck once they had reached the front of the line.

"Our Chow Burger is made with our finest meatless meat," the man in the vehicle boasted.

"And . . . what's in that?"

"It's a beef product that is one hundred percent beef-free."

"Well, that sounds terrific," AJ said dryly, "but if it isn't really beef, then what is it?"

"I just told you. It's beef, only beefless."

AJ exchanged a bewildered look with Ezra.

"What's the issue here?" the man questioned them peevishly. "Do you have allergies? If so, I can guarantee that our burger is completely free from soy, nuts, dairy, shellfish—"

"Thanks, but what the hell is actually _in_ it?"

"Sir, you're holding up the line. If you're not going to order, then please step aside."

"Just let me have the burger," AJ sighed. He pulled a bill from his wallet and poked it through the window.

The man unveiled a somewhat chilling smile. "I knew you'd come around in the end. Do you want any baconless bacon on your Chow Burger?"

"Fine, lay it on me."

The two librarians turned from the window to find a group of people poised behind them, as if ready to spring into the truck and devour its contents. "I'm here for my fourth round of Chow," one person spoke up gleefully. "I just can't get enough."

"How's the burger? Do you know what's in it?" AJ asked.

"Oh, it's like nothing you've ever eaten before," the person gushed, their eyes wide with enthusiasm. "It's amazing."

"What's holding up the line?" yelled an angry voice from farther down the queue.

Not wanting to incur the ire of the Chow Truck devotees, Ezra and AJ stepped to the sidelines to wait for the burger. "I can't tell if this truck is selling real food," AJ remarked in an undertone.

"I wouldn't worry about it," said Ezra. "The burger is probably made with mushrooms or something."

"Then why didn't anyone say that?"

"Perhaps it's a secret family recipe."

"I feel like I'm being inducted into a cult," AJ muttered. "What about you? Were you planning to order anything here?"

"No, I think I'll see what the other trucks are selling. Is that all right with you?"

"Go ahead. I'll come find you once I get this mystery meat burger."

Ezra had just received his lunch from a truck called The Big Avocado when AJ reappeared at his side. "Well, here it is," AJ said skeptically, holding up an ostensibly normal burger in a little paper tray. He peered at Ezra's food. "What's that? A green taco?"

"Yes, sort of. It's filled with fried avocado, and then topped with guacamole, and the tortilla is also made from avocados, but I didn't quite catch how they managed that."

"God, I hope you like avocados."

"I do, but . . . this might be a bit outside the realm of moderation."

"Then why did you get it?"

"I don't know. The men running the truck all seemed very earnest about their cooking. I didn't want to disappoint them."

"Oh, so you got distracted by the nice, handsome men?" AJ looked toward the truck, where one of the employees was leaning out of the window to take an order.

"That's not what I meant at all! I was only being civil to them."

AJ was still observing the staff of the food truck. "I've got to say, I've never seen anyone wear their hair in two peaks like that." He turned back to Ezra. "Maybe I should give that look a try. You know, get a pair of horns to complete the devil aesthetic."

"Why don't you stop pretending you're a demon and eat that burger before it gets cold?"

"For an angel, you certainly enjoy watching me suffer." AJ picked up the burger from its tray and lifted it to his nose. "It smells all right."

Ezra caught a surprisingly mouthwatering whiff of The Chow Truck's creation. "I think it smells rather good."

"Really? Would you like to have the first bite?"

"No, thank you. I'll let you have that honor."

AJ scowled and took a tentative bite of the burger. "It's not bad, actually," he said once he'd swallowed. "Good flavor."

"Can you tell what it's made of?"

AJ mulled over his second mouthful. "No, but now I honestly don't care. For foodless food, it's pretty damn tasty."

They carried their lunches to an unoccupied park bench on the outskirts of the lawn. Ezra polished off his taco, feeling that he had eaten his fill of avocados for at least the next six months, while AJ devoured his burger with increasing gusto. When he was done, he tipped the paper tray over his mouth to catch any crumbless crumbs and said, "I could go for another one of these."

"Another burgerless burger? Are you serious?"

"That guy was right. It was like nothing I'd ever eaten before."

"There's an awfully long line in front of the truck now, so you don't have time to get seconds."

"Fuck," AJ cursed under his breath, gazing down mournfully at the empty tray. "It was so good, Ezra. You have to try it."

Ezra mumbled something noncommittal and patted his mouth with a paper napkin printed with smiling avocados. "Do you want to get some ice cream instead? My treat."

The offer broke whatever spell The Chow Truck had cast over AJ. After throwing away their trash—AJ with a wistful backward glance at his burger tray—they headed toward a truck that served homemade ice cream.

"Isn't this refreshing?" Ezra asked as they idled near the truck with their heaping cones. "I dread going back to work. It's so warm under that tent."

"Of course you're sweltering in that heavy shirt. You could at least roll up your sleeves." AJ brandished one of his own exposed forearms as an example. Regrettably, the finer points of sleeve-rolling and its cooling benefits were lost on Ezra, who saw only an opportunity for some discreet ogling.

"My shirt would get wrinkled," he protested distractedly.

"For god's sake, it's not worth sweating yourself to death over a few wrinkles."

Ezra, still mid-ogle, didn't bother to respond, so AJ made a sly addendum: "I can roll them for you if you're too busy."

Ezra tugged his eyes back up to his companion's face. "Busy? With what?"

"Between eating that ice cream and drooling over my tattoo, you seem to have a lot on your plate."

"First of all," Ezra glowered over his double scoop of strawberry ice cream, "I was not drooling in any way, shape, or form. Secondly, if I want to roll up my sleeves, I can do it myself."

"Sure you can, but consider it payment for my ice cream." AJ stepped closer until they were standing toe-to-toe, as if their shoes had gotten impatient with their owners and decided to do the kissing themselves. "Hold my cone for me, will you, angel?"

Ezra accepted the proffered dessert, but not without raising a complaint. "You're really going to keep calling me that, aren't you?"

"Do you have a better nickname in mind?" AJ inquired while he loosened the small button securing Ezra's left cuff.

"Why should I? As you said, I have too much on my plate to spend time coming up with nicknames for myself."

"Fair enough." AJ folded back Ezra's cuff and worked his thumbs under the sleeve, his fingers encircling Ezra's arm as he deftly turned over a couple inches of fabric.

Ezra averted his eyes from AJ's capable hands and scanned their surroundings to remind himself that they were in a public place. "Ana would like this nature center," he said, watching a group of people follow one of the trails that led into the mass of trees beyond the lawn. "She's always talking about going for walks in the woods."

"Send her a text to come over. She can chaperone us."

"I would never inflict chaperoning you on one of my friends. Anyway, she wouldn't be able to come here today. She and her fiancé were planning to go on some long bike ride along the canal."

"How nice for them," murmured AJ, whose thumbs were now stroking Ezra's arm in a way that had nothing to do with the mechanics of sleeve-rolling.

Goosebumps prickled Ezra's skin, but he refused to change the subject. "You wouldn't think it was nice if you were there. Ana said they were going to get up at dawn— _actual_ dawn—so they could spend the whole morning biking."

"Sounds fucking awful." AJ folded back another portion of Ezra's sleeve. "All things considered, I'd say we had the better morning, don't you think?"

"Well, yes, depending on your perspective. . . . AJ, how much longer are you going to be working on that sleeve? You'd think my arms were ten feet long with the amount of time it's taking you."

"Be patient. Just because I drive fast doesn't mean I don't take my time in other areas." AJ's lips quirked upward. "Speaking of driving, I wonder if Ana saw my Bentley in the parking lot this morning."

He had phrased the conjecture as a joke, but Ezra reacted with something more akin to horror. "Do you think she did? I mean, she could have. Our buildings share a parking lot." He screwed his eyes shut. "Oh god, I feel embarrassed just thinking about it."

"Why be embarrassed?" The question prompted Ezra to open his eyes. AJ's glasses had started to ride down his nose, and Ezra could make out a little frown line that had appeared between his eyebrows. "So what if your friend saw my car at your place and assumed that I spent the night? That's more accurate than not."

"I know, but she would think we slept together."

"Didn't we?" AJ make a few final tweaks to the sleeve and looked up to meet Ezra's gaze.

"You know what I mean," Ezra said shakily.

The smile resurfaced on AJ's lips. "Again, not an unfair assumption. I wasn't exactly thinking about giving you a collegial handshake when I had you pinned down in your bed."

"My goodness, AJ, please don't let any of our coworkers hear you talking like that."

"I won't do that, Ezra. Honestly, I probably shouldn't have even made that crack to Mary about getting lucky. Tell me to crawl back to hell if I do it again." AJ closed his hand around Ezra's fist, but he hid any tenderness in the gesture behind the apparent aim of pulling Ezra's arm outward to display the newly rolled sleeve. "Aren't you going to admire my handiwork?"

Ezra regarded his bare forearm during its rare public appearance. "It does feel cooler. Thank you."

"Save the thanks for later. Next arm, please." AJ reached for Ezra's right cuff and nodded at the cone of cinnamon ice cream in Ezra's other hand. "You can try some of that if you like."

The spicy sweetness of the ice cream and the occasional graze of AJ's fingernails against his arm dominated Ezra's thoughts until AJ remarked, "All done here. Looks like your strawberry stuff's turning into a puddle, though." Sure enough, several pink rivulets were coursing down the cone in Ezra's right hand and closing in on his fingers.

"Oh dear, I forgot all about that." Ezra began to draw the cone toward his mouth, but AJ gently restrained his wrist.

"Don't be selfish, angel. Let me have a taste." Holding Ezra's hand steady, AJ bent his head and licked away the cascade of ice cream, his tongue passing a hair's breadth from Ezra's fingers. Their eyes met over the tops of AJ's sunglasses as he swiped his tongue across his lips, swallowed, and leaned in to give the dripping dessert a second, gratuitous lick.

With such entertainment, Ezra could not be held responsible for losing his awareness of the public setting. Nor, for that matter, could he be blamed for nearly smushing the entire cone into AJ's face when Mary materialized next to them and exclaimed, "Hi, you two!" Fortunately, AJ got away with only a pink splotch on one side of his mouth.

"Oh, gosh, sorry to creep up on you," Mary apologized. "Do you need a napkin, AJ?"

"Um, no, I think I've got one on me somewhere." AJ rummaged in his pockets, while Ezra stood speechless, his scarlet face bookended by the two longsuffering cones.

"It's so sweet that you pals are sharing your ice cream. Don't you think it would have been easier with a bowl, though?" Mary wondered aloud. "Anyhow, I hate to cut in on your fun, but we're awfully busy up at the tent. When you're done here, could you guys run out to my car and get some more boxes of books for the giveaway?"

"Ye-yes, we can do that," Ezra's vocal cords finally cooperated. A muffled "Yeah" emanated from behind AJ's napkin.

"Great! Let me give you my car key and tell you where I parked." Mary pulled an overloaded keychain from the pocket of her pants and finagled a fob from the jingling mess.

Meanwhile, Ezra returned AJ's cinnamon ice cream and gave his own cone the most chaste lick that he could muster, so as not to subject his supervisor to further exhibitions of her colleagues' tongues. Only a couple soggy bites remained by the time that Mary had delivered her last volley of pleasantries and disappeared into the crowd.

"God, it's been a long day," AJ grumbled ten minutes later, as they lugged two large cardboard boxes of used paperbacks from the trunk of Mary's car.

"It's not yet one o'clock, AJ. We still have most of the afternoon ahead of us."

"Don't remind me." AJ propped his box against his hip and slammed the trunk shut. "Come on, let's check out that shortcut Mary talked about."

In the midst of her chatter, Mary had mentioned a path that cut through the woods bordering the parking lot and opened onto the side of the lawn nearest the library tent. Conveniently, the entrance to the trail lay only a few yards from her car. Ezra and AJ plodded past the first ranks of trees, the crunch of gravel fading into the more subdued sound of shoes against mulch. The fresh spring foliage shaded them from the sunshine, but just enough light filtered between the leaves to stave off gloominess. The hubbub of the open house lingered behind the buffer of trees.

"This spot is nice and quiet, isn't it?" Ezra remarked for lack of anything better to say. AJ's answer was somewhere between a hum and a grunt.

Ezra increased his pace so that they were walking abreast. "I know you're tired, AJ, but work will be over soon enough." The box of books was digging into his stomach, but he managed a slightly breathless laugh. "At least you haven't had to ride a bike all day, like Ana and Newton."

Any sound that AJ made in response was drowned out by a series of thumps and creaks as they stepped from the mulch onto a plank bridge that spanned a small, brackish body of water. The bridge was sheltered by a structure resembling the roof of a gazebo, underneath which were a couple of benches bristling with splinters. The roof and railings must have been painted white at some indeterminate point in the past, but the paint was peeling so badly that the whole thing looked fuzzy from a distance.

Upon reaching the center of the bridge, AJ drew to an abrupt halt, pivoted to Ezra, and said, "Look, I get that you don't want to tell your friends that I slept over."

Ezra fidgeted with his box to conceal his discomfiture. "It's only for privacy," he faltered. "Yours as much as mine."

"Right, but are you sure it's not because you think having me over was a mistake?"

"Obviously not. Why on earth would you think that?"

"Well. . . ." AJ's eye contact with Ezra wavered for a heartbeat. "I keep remembering that a couple of weeks ago, you said you weren't sure if I was worth wanting."

"I said that?"

"Yeah, when we were coming home from the Nightingale that first night."

Ezra felt his face contract into a frown. "That's not what I meant."

"No?"

"No! Weren't you listening to me?" He regretted the question the moment it left his mouth.

AJ dumped his box onto one of the splintery benches and crossed his arms. "I sure as hell was, and what I heard was that you thought wanting me would be a lot of trouble."

"But wanting anybody is a lot of trouble! That was my point. You never know what it'll lead to in the long term. You can't know all the risks."

"Ezra, we're talking about kissing, not flying to outer space. I know you seemed receptive this morning, but if you haven't really made up your mind, then do me a favor and fucking tell me."

"But I have made up my mind! I thought I made that clear."

" _I_ made things clear. You've mostly just left me guessing." AJ untwisted his arms to let them hang at his sides. "Your mind isn't a book, Ezra. I can't read it."

So there Ezra stood, once more challenged to say exactly what he felt, and this time he didn't have the incentive of AJ's mouth waiting a quark's width away from his neck. He glanced left and right, but other than a squirrel chasing its tail in the undergrowth, there was nobody around to cause a convenient interruption. He absently surveyed the box in his arms. One of the cardboard flaps had come loose, providing a glimpse of somebody's chiseled abs on the cover of a romance novel.

Ezra didn't know how the possessor of the abs addressed their love interest, but he guessed that their catalogue of swoony speeches did not include the sentence: "I won't say you're nice, because I know you don't like that, but nonetheless . . . I don't think you're not worth wanting." Evidently, Ezra ought to have read more romance novels.

AJ peeled off his sunglasses and leveled a blank stare at him. "Ezra, that was about as clear as a metric ton of black paint. Try again."

"Perhaps not now, but when work is over—"

"As a tip, avoid using the word _not_."

"Very well," Ezra snapped, gently laying his box on the closest bench. He considered dropping it to produce an emphatic thud, but even high emotion didn't justify potential damage to the books.

"Very well," he repeated, each of the words taking him a step closer to AJ. "If you had let me get a word in edgewise this morning, I would have told you that I _do_ want you, and I _do_ want to kiss you. And, yes, it's true that I don't . . . that is, I'm still unsure of what the consequences might be, but"—his voice softened despite his best efforts—"good lord, AJ, if I have to take a risk for someone, then it might as well be for you."

Somewhere in the middle of this declaration, Ezra's feet had gotten tangled up with AJ's, and his hands had gathered fistfuls of black shirt. One of AJ's arms had snaked around Ezra's waist, while the other hand fiddled with his bowtie. "So, I'm your 'might as well' option?" AJ asked in a low tone, the movements of his lips teasing Ezra more effectively than the actual words ever could.

"You know I didn't mean it like that. You don't fool me."

"Yeah, yeah, we've already established that you're not a sucker." AJ lifted his hand and ran his thumb along the underside of Ezra's bottom lip. "Absolutely, positively not." The very lightness of his fingertips against Ezra's jaw bespoke the weight of longing behind the touch.

Ezra drew an unsteady breath, and AJ's face swam before his eyes in a gorgeous blur, but he wasn't yet ready to relinquish the last word. If AJ demanded vulnerability, then the least he could do for Ezra was tolerate a compliment.

"Actually, I take back what I said before," Ezra announced as he watched the space between their mouths dwindle away. "I _will_ say you're a nice person, because you are. I know it, you know it, everyone knows it." His hands flattened against AJ's chest, and his eyes were halfway closed in anticipation. "You're the nicest person I've ever m—"

"Shut up, angel," AJ whispered against his lips.

Admittedly, their first kiss was little more than an awkward brush of lips, and the second one wasn't much better, since Ezra was so intent on registering the warmth and unexpected softness of AJ's mouth that he forgot to do anything with his own lips. He made up for it on the third and fourth kisses, however, catching a tiny, panting breath from AJ against his tongue, along with the lingering flavor of cinnamon ice cream. By the fifth kiss, Ezra had slid his hands up over AJ's shoulders and clasped the back of his neck to press their open mouths together.

Ezra had read many novels over the years and had seen kisses compared to fireworks, drinks, promises, and all manner of things. But, for him, kissing AJ Crowley wasn't _like_ anything. It was just the simple, staggering reality of having his friend's arms locked around him, and his favorite coworker's tongue curving into his mouth, and his not-so-secret crush's body pressed against his own, mirroring every inch of the desires that Ezra had refused to believe could be returned. It was the challenge of trying to distill everything he felt into a movement of his lips or a touch of his hand, and the joy of knowing that the task was impossible, because then he would get to keep trying over and over and over, until frustration and pleasure became as intertwined as his fingers tangled in AJ's hair.


End file.
